


Pillars of Sand

by Sed



Series: Revelation [3]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 08:36:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4998034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sed/pseuds/Sed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A political crisis leaves Damar struggling to salvage his efforts at peace with Bajor and the rest of the Alpha Quadrant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A timeline of the series so far will be available at the end of this story.

_“...Despite our past, despite the wrongs which still remain to be righted between our people, Cardassia is, and will continue to remain committed to peace with Bajor. The loss… our allies have suffered today will not shake that commitment. And it will not go unaddressed._  
  
_“I offer my sincerest condolences not only to the Bajoran people, but also to the families of those who were so viciously wronged in this cowardly assault. As a gesture of our continued intentions toward friendship, I personally promise any and all assistance the Cardassian Union can provide in identifying, apprehending, and punishing those responsible for this tragedy…”_  
  
  
  
  
Around the time he finished his third glass, Damar stopped wondering why he hadn’t yet heard from the First Minister. Some time after choking back his fifth, he started to recall just how much he had always appreciated the numbing effects of a fine kanar. And by the time he finally abandoned the glass in favor of drinking straight from the bottle, he’d almost forgotten the reason he was drinking in the first place. It was only the brief pause while he searched for more that parted the clouds in his head long enough to remind him: he drank because there was nothing else he _could_ do.  
  
Nelara had come and gone at some point earlier in the evening, before Damar lost track of his senses and time. She offered him first tea, then water, and then she stopped asking if he wanted anything at all. The padd she’d left on his desk was still sitting there, staring up at the ceiling. He wouldn’t touch it. Even if he thought he could focus his eyes long enough to actually read the words on the screen, he didn’t want to see the information it contained. He knew enough already. The newscasts had been distressingly frank in their report on the attack of the Bajoran ships.  
  
At some point the day began to shift into the cooler evening, and the room darkened along with the fading light. Damar didn’t bother to remind the computer that it should raise the lights inside to compensate. He sat in the dark, swallowing kanar, hating _everything_.  
  
“I never should have left,” he slurred to himself. “I never should have touched her.”  
  
_He_ had done this. _He_ had condemned her because he was too selfish to let her go. And now he had lost it all; the Bajorans had placed an indefinite moratorium on the trade arrangement, the Klingons were moving into “defensive” positions around the Union, and the normally chatty representatives of the Federation had gone unnervingly silent. Cardassia was alone. Kira was gone.  
  
_It’s not just you who’ll end up paying the price for this indiscretion._  
  
Kren’s words hammered at the inside of Damar’s skull, echoing in a horrible refrain that left him hunched over in his chair, shouting at the phantom of the other Cardassian’s presence.  
  
It wasn’t just his selfish desire that had brought them to this point, it was also pride. The same pride that had damned them all, time and again, and would damn them until there was no one left to suffer the consequences of their imagined self-importance. Until Cardassia was nothing more than the empty, dusty remnant of an empire that had once stood tall beside the other great powers of the quadrant. People would speak of the Cardassians as a cautionary tale. A fate to be avoided. And they _deserved it_.  
  
Somewhere between screaming his rage at the floor and hurling one of the empty bottles at the wall, Damar found himself on the ground behind his desk. He had never given the room or the furniture in it a great deal of thought; no one knew who lived in the house before his staff commandeered it, if anyone had. The identity of the desk’s previous owner was a mystery. But whoever it was that furnished the house, they had obviously been a loyal citizen of the Union, and dutifully seen to it that their allegiance was etched into the front of every drawer in the office. Facing him five times over was the crest of the Cardassian Union; the unmistakable emblem that graced everything it made sense to brand—and often some things it didn’t. Damar reached out to trace the raised edge of the closest one, and his finger stopped just above the green hood.  
  
He recognized the shade of green. Of course he’d seen it countless times before in his life, but it had always hovered somewhere in the subconscious part of his mind. He had never really thought about it, it was just _there_. Yet now, staring at it from his vantage point on the floor, he realized its more personal significance. He knew why it stood out so vividly in his mind; it was the color of the dress she had worn the night they were supposed to have dinner. A silly, simple response to his own gesture that he’d overlooked at the time because he was too tired and angry to care.  
  
Realizing that, Damar relinquished the last shred of control he had bothered holding on to, and reached for another bottle.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
“Captain B’gor of the _Ya’Vang_ says they’ve established a perimeter around the wreckage. They’re waiting for word from us.”  
  
“To…?” Ezri prompted, but Julian’s attention had already drifted again. “Julian?”  
  
The errant reflection he had caught in the captain’s desk suddenly seemed far less interesting than it had been a moment earlier, and Julian’s focus snapped back to the conversation. “To start bringing the wreckage aboard, so it can be examined.”  
  
“They can’t just use the ship’s sensors?”  
  
Julian shook his head. “The alloy used in the construction of the Bajoran ships was…” He made a meaningless gesture at nothing. “Well, we both know the Bajorans weren’t in the most enviable position following the Cardassian withdrawal. They had to use what resources were available to them. I imagine the ships that came from that time were not constructed with their potential to be salvaged in mind. Most of the wreckage is too small to scan adequately for our purposes.”  
  
“That makes sense, I guess. But can the _Ya’Vang_ haul all of that back here by itself?”  
  
“The _Jemison_ is returning to the area to assist with recovery of the wreckage. It’ll take a day or so, but Captain Cats has assured me they will recover every micron of debris out there. Constable Ilpal is clearing bays four and five as we speak.”  
  
“It’ll take you weeks to sift through all that by yourself,” Ezri said. “Frankly, I’m a little surprised the Bajorans don’t want to handle it themselves. Those were their people.”  
  
“They are, in a way. The Council of Ministers contacted me and requested that I conduct my forensic examination in cooperation with one of their own experts. They were even kind enough to let me choose someone myself. She should be arriving in a few day’s time.”  
  
“Well, that’s a little relief, at least,” Ezri said. She reached out and put a hand on Julian’s arm. “But if you feel like you need to take some time, don’t ignore it and push yourself anyway. Kira wouldn’t have wanted that.”  
  
Julian smiled, but inside he was already setting her advice to the side. He would do whatever was necessary to ensure that Kira’s killers could be identified. She deserved better than an ambush on a mission of peace. She deserved justice. “Of course,” he lied, conscious of the doubt in Ezri’s eyes.  
  
“This would have been a lot simpler if there had been something to follow.”  
  
He hummed in agreement. “Captain B’gor assured me they conducted several scans, but…”  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“Nothing,” Julian confirmed. It was incredibly strange, given that the prevailing theory revolved around Cardassian assailants for very obvious reasons. A theory Julian wasn’t entirely certain he disagreed with, apart from the total lack of any evidence as-yet to support it.  
  
The chime sounded from the door, and they turned together to find Lieutenant R’nel standing on the other side of the glass. R’nel was part of the small detachment of personnel the station had received to replace their diminished numbers in the months following the war. Starfleet was stretched thin, but it appeared as though they still deemed the station important enough to warrant special consideration when it came time to pass out assignments, for which everyone was truly grateful.  
  
Julian nodded, and R’nel tapped the panel and entered the captain’s office. “Sir, with your permission, I would like to take the _Defiant_ to rendezvous with the _Jemison_.”  
  
“Do you think that’s necessary, Lieutenant?”  
  
“I believe so, sir.” she said crisply, offering no further explanation.  
  
Julian quickly weighed the pros and cons and then nodded his permission. “Give my regards to Captain Cats,” he said. The presence of unauthorized Klingon vessels in the region might very well ruffle some feathers, but if anything, a greater Starfleet presence could actually act as a balm. There really was no reason not to allow R’nel to take the _Defiant_ out there. And there was no one he trusted more to keep a cool head than a Vulcan.  
  
R’nel turned on her heel and marched from the room. When Julian turned back to Ezri she was standing with her arms crossed and her worried eyes locked on the window behind the captain’s desk. A deep frown pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “Apart from the terribly obvious, of course.”  
  
“I really thought we were close to peace. Actual peace,” she said. “But if it was the Cardassians—”  
  
“You know as well as I do that Damar wouldn’t allow something like this,” Julian said, conscious that his own misgivings made that a deflection, at best. He liked Damar, despite the man’s surly and often extremely trying personality. But Damar was one man, and he could not possibly account for his entire race. “And you know why.”  
  
Ezri shook her head. “It’s not Damar I’m worried about. It’s _everyone else_. What if he isn’t really in control of the Cardassian Union? What if they’ve decided they don’t like the thought of being a defeated people, after all?”  
  
There was no good answer to that, so Julian fell back on platitudes, instead. “We have to trust in him, and the rest of the Alpha Quadrant, to do what’s right,” he said. “To continue working for peace, rather than against it. Finding out who attacked those ships is the first step in ensuring that happens.”  
  
“Well, I hope you’re right about that,” she said. “And I hope it doesn’t just wind up making everything worse.”  
  
Julian allowed his attention to shift to the Bajoran personnel at work on the other side of the glass door. He could see it in their furrowed brows, and the quick, decisive movements they made as they went about their tasks. It wasn’t sadness he saw in the tight jaws and narrowed eyes. It was anger. “Let’s hope not,” he muttered.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Damar woke to the sound of the office door opening. He couldn’t see anything at first, and for a brief, panic-stricken moment, he thought he’d managed to drink himself blind. When his quiet terror subsided and he _opened his eyes_ , he realized the room was actually well lit, and it was some time in the late afternoon. He shrugged it off with a meaningless grunt; it wasn’t the first time he had woken up sputtering and groaning, reaching frantically for nothing. He’d been drinking himself into a stupor for days. With some effort, he eventually crawled out from under his desk and squinted at the visitor. It was Nelara, with another unsolicited glass of water.  
  
“What?” he demanded numbly.  
  
“Sir, I brought you some water—”  
  
“I didn’t ask for water.”  
  
“And I thought you would want to know that two more Klingon vessels, the _Jemison_ , and the _Defiant_ have all crossed the border and rendezvoused at the location of the attack,” she continued, managing remarkable grace under the weight of his bitter scowl.  
  
Damar tried to absorb the information—a considerable task, given the amount of alcohol it had to swim through first. No one even asked permission to enter Cardassian space anymore. Not that he could have stopped them, even if he had felt inclined to try. Let them come.  
  
After a minute or two he said, “Who’s commanding the _Defiant?_ ”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Probably _Bashir_ ,” Damar said, sneering the doctor’s name childishly. He would have been the senior officer aboard the station after Kira, wouldn’t he? But perhaps that meant he had remained behind. Who, then, would be in command of the little warship?  
  
Suddenly, and with so much force that it made Nelara step back, Damar roared with laughter. He imagined Lieutenant Nog, sitting in the chair in the center of the bridge. “ _His feet wouldn’t even touch the floor,_ ” he gasped in amusement.  
  
“Sir?”  
  
He waved away Nelara’s concern. “Nothing,” he said, quickly composing himself. At least it seemed that way from his own perspective. Unbeknownst to Damar, from the outside he still looked like a complete wreck. Swaying on his knees behind the desk, head slowly drooping to the cool black surface, he appeared on the verge of passing out.  
  
“You really should drink the water,” Nelara urged. “I can bring you more if it’s not enough.”  
  
“I don’t want water,” Damar reminded her. “I don’t want anything.”  
  
“But you should—”  
  
With more command of his faculties than he’d been able to manage in days, Damar shot to his feet, swaying only slightly less than he had been on his knees, and slapped his open palms down on top of the desk. “I said NO!” he shouted.  
  
After a tense and quiet moment, Nelara squared her shoulders crossly and nodded. “I’ll see to it you’re not disturbed for the rest of the day,” she said. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”  
  
Damar sank back into his seat and let it carry him in a slow circle until he was facing the window. “Another bottle of kanar,” he said quietly.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
“The _Jemison_ reports that preliminary scans indicate the attacking vessel was likely of Cardassian origin,” one of the men noted from the back of the bridge. “But there’s no way to know for certain until the wreckage is examined more closely. They’re beaming aboard the first of the _Lhovol’s_ hull fragments now.”  
  
“Excellent,” B’gor growled. “The sooner we know for certain, the sooner we can hunt down those responsible.” He steepled his fingers and grimaced at the screen. It was ridiculous that they had to wait at all. Curse Starfleet and their insistence upon procedure! Had _he_ been in command of the invasion of Cardassia, there wouldn’t have _been_ a Cardassian Union left to deal with. Allowing them to remain a sovereign power after their failed alliance with the Dominion was foolish, and borderline dishonorable in B’gor’s estimation. It was the Federation and their weak sentimentality that allowed the Cardassians to escape punishment, but things were about to change. When they confirmed that the Bajoran ships had been destroyed by Cardassian weapons, it would open the door to the conquest that should have been, and the Alpha Quadrant—led by soldiers of the Klingon Empire—would finally take its rightful vengeance.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
“I was afraid of that,” Julian sighed. Of course, someone could have intended for it to appear as though the ships had been attacked by Cardassians. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but it certainly gave him more hope for a peaceful outcome than the alternative.  
  
_“As I understand it there were many among the crew with similar concerns,”_ R’nel said, giving away none of her own thoughts on the matter. _“Captain Cats has informed me that it will take a minimum of six hours to bring the last of the wreckage aboard the_ Jemison _. However, Captain B’gor offered to conduct tandem sensor sweeps to search for remaining debris fragments once the recovery is complete. I estimate our return to the station should take between thirty-six and thirty-eight hours, depending upon the results of their efforts.”_  
  
Julian nodded. “Good. Security has already finished clearing bays four and five, so it shouldn’t take long to begin my examination. Excellent work, Lieutenant. I’ll see you in a few days.”  
  
The transmission ended, and Julian let out a long sigh as he leaned back in the captain’s chair.  
  
He wondered if Captain Sisko would come back now that the colonel was gone. Sisko had obviously trusted her with the position. Leaving for good—or what may have been, in any case—did he feel more at ease with Kira in command? It wasn’t that Julian wished one way or another for the captain’s return; he completely understood his reasons for remaining on Bajor. As much as Julian admired and respected his commanding officer, no one could begrudge the man time with the family he may well have lost, had things gone differently.  
  
The comm beeped again, and Julian frowned. His time to himself was rapidly disappearing with each passing hour. “Yes?”  
  
_“Doctor, the shuttle from Bajor has arrived. It’s at docking port two now.”_  
  
Turning his thoughts from the captain and the newest storm gathering strength on the horizon, Julian sat up and thanked the officer on the other end. He gathered his jacket from the back of the chair and jogged down the steps into Ops.  
  
It was no more than a brisk walk from the turbolift to the section of the docking ring where he was to meet his guest, and impeded only by a brief and customarily chatty encounter with Morn. He arrived a few minutes later than he had intended, but still within what seemed to him like a reasonable amount of time—though he was conscious of how little that might mean. When he arrived he found the exit of the docking port empty, and the ship’s crew hard at work unloading the items they had brought along from the planet.  
  
“Took you long enough,” a gravelly voice said from behind him. “I expected you to meet me when I arrived.”  
  
Julian turned and found Doctor Tastha standing behind him. Where she had come from he couldn’t even begin to guess. He started to apologize, but she stopped him with a bony hand held up between them. “Never mind that,” she said. “Where am I staying?”  
  
He stretched out an arm. “Right this way, Doctor,”  
  
“We’re back to that, are we?” she said. The question was heavy with disapproval.  
  
“Tastha.”  
  
“Better.”  
  
She sniffed and pulled her crochet shawl tighter around her shoulders, shuffling along behind Julian as he led her to the Habitat Ring. “Do you have any luggage?” he asked, realizing only after they had crossed the connecting bridge that she carried no more than a single bag.  
  
“I travel light,” she said. “Fine time to ask me, though.”  
  
Julian smiled tightly. Oh, how he had _missed_ her.  
  
“It’s just down here,” he said as they approached the guest quarters he had assigned to her. When they reached the door he opened it and stepped back so that she could enter ahead of him. “You have a conference uplink, access to all medical archives available through the station’s memory, and a private subspace channel for your personal use.”  
  
“You’ve outdone yourself, Julian,” Tastha said affectionately. “I suppose all that’s left now is for me to unpack.” She looked around the room and then hefted her bag and tossed it onto the closest chair. “There. That was easy.”  
  
Despite himself, and his own wariness of her unpredictable mood swings, Julian chuckled. “It will be another three days before we can get our hands on the wreckage,” he informed her. “But if you’d like, we can begin by setting up comparative genetic profiles for each of the Bajoran crewmen. I’ve already prepared the supplies we’ll need to get started.”  
  
Tastha was already on her way out the door again before Julian thought to follow. “Come along, then!” she called back to him as he hurried to catch up.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Would they starve before they were annihilated? Or would it be sickness that took them when the Federation doctors withdrew in advance of the coming destruction? How long could the meager remnants of the military hold off the Klingons? If the Bajorans joined them, which they almost certainly would, could that damage relations between Bajor and the Federation?  
  
Damar laughed at himself. He was facing the potential end of his race, and some part of him still worried about how Bajor would come through it. Of course he only wondered because Kira would have wondered; she would have worried that aggression against the Cardassian Union might damage the understanding that Bajor was guaranteed eventual Federation membership. They may have made great strides in recovering from the Occupation, but they were still vulnerable without powerful allies.  
  
Allies like the Klingons.  
  
He rolled over and looked out the window. It was late—or perhaps it was early. He couldn’t tell anymore, and it didn’t really matter, anyway. He had no meetings to attend, no state matters that required his attention. He was powerless, and he didn’t care. What did it matter? The failed experiment to revitalize the sinking Union was on his shoulders, and he was as lost as the rest of them.  
  
He had fallen from that great climb, and the height would claim them all when they met the bottom together.  
  
“You lied to me,” he muttered to his memory of Captain Sisko.  
  
The captain hadn’t _really_ lied, of course, and Damar knew that—he had simply omitted the truth. If anyone understood the difference, it was a Cardassian. Sisko had chosen to let him believe that things would still work out somehow. He had smiled and signaled his approval when Damar said he intended to fight the odds, knowing that it would only make things worse for all of them. He had let _his own friend_ die.  
  
Damar squinted at the blur of city lights twinkling madly outside his window. He tried to sit up, but his body had given up the fight somewhere after the third bottle of the day. Instead he lay there, watching the dizzying array of gold that shimmered through his impaired vision, fighting past his mind’s inability to correctly process everything it was seeing. When he finally shut his eyes he was able to devote his focus to the stray thought that was battling its way to the forefront of his mind, demanding attention.  
  
_Sisko_ let _Kira die?_  
  
Kira, his first officer, his friend, a woman he had trusted with his life. He allowed her to be killed in an ambush attack while returning from a mission of peace, all because _Damar_ chose poorly?  
  
“No,” he slurred, and then a little more clearly, “ _No!_ ”  
  
Sisko wasn’t a fool, and he wasn’t a monster—he wouldn’t have allowed her to die just to teach Damar a lesson. He couldn’t, it was unconscionable. No matter what sort of power he wielded on behalf of the Prophets, it simply made no sense. Damar hadn’t known the captain very well, but he was confident that Sisko was not the sort of man to stand back and let someone die if he had the power to stop it. Especially knowing it would be the unavoidable outcome of Damar’s choice, which his comments had seemed to indicate. At the very least he wouldn’t have _smiled_ about it.  
  
“You bastard,” Damar snarled, fighting to sit up. Every muscle protested and his back nearly gave out from the strain. Distantly he became aware that he was shirtless, but he couldn’t recall when that had happened, or why. He finally managed to roll over and push himself up onto his hands and knees, cheering a little at his small victory. The kanar conspired with his body to weaken his arms further, but he held himself up nevertheless. After a moment of heavy breathing and some struggle to find his balance, he pushed off from the floor and made it to his knees. From there he relied on the desk to hold his weight and keep him upright until he was on his feet. “Get—get—hello—” he punched the comm with his thumb a few times, but it didn’t respond. Finally he slapped his whole palm on the console and it beeped a query. “Get me Shakaar,” he demanded of whoever was on the other end.  
  
_“Legate Damar?”_ came a confused voice. _“Sir?”_  
  
Damar looked around for the source of the noise before he remembered what he was doing. “Shakaar,” he said, without any other instructions.  
  
Shakaar had to believe him. He _had to_.  
  
_“Sir, would you like me to place a transmission to the First Minister’s office on Bajor?”_ the voice asked.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
_“That will take some time.”_  
  
Damar closed his eyes and sighed. Of course, he forgot: Cardassia’s communication network suffered from a chokepoint even he couldn’t bypass. “Inform me when he responds,” he said.  
  
There was silence on the other end, and Damar wondered if he was speaking as clearly as he believed. It all sounded fine to _him_ , but then he had more than enough experience with intoxication to know that often didn’t translate to what was actually coming out of his mouth. Weyoun in particular had always enjoyed reminding him of the nonsensical things he raved about when he was caught in one of his moods.  
  
_“Sir?”_  
  
“Hm? What?”  
  
_“I... was—I was just asking if there was there anything else I could do for you.”_  
  
Damar thought about it for what he was distantly aware could have been considered too long, and then shook his head. When it registered that he was only speaking to a voice, he said, “No,” and closed the channel.  
  
Less than a minute later he opened it again and instructed the voice on the other end to locate Nelara and send her to his office.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Julian watched as each piece of the _Lhovol_ was beamed into the cargo bay one at a time. The metal was twisted and burned, warped from an excess of phaser fire that had clearly been intended to spare as little of the Bajoran vessels as possible. What few distinguishable scorch patterns he could make out he noted for further study once the unloading was complete. As more of the ships appeared among the neatly spaced rows, he felt less and less certain that they were going to be able to identify any remains at all. Whoever it was behind the attack, they had done an excellent job of obliterating as much of the evidence as they possibly could.  
  
“So much destruction,” he muttered to himself, unaware that Captain B’gor had stepped up behind him.  
  
“Indeed,” the Klingon rumbled, making Julian jump. “And when we set out to take our revenge on the cowards responsible for it, I welcome you to join us. Provided you have the stomach for battle, of course.”  
  
“If we can determine who is responsible, I’ll be happy to see _justice_ served,” Julian responded, making an effort to avoid encouraging the slaughter he was certain B’gor had in mind.  
  
“We already know who did this, Doctor. Starfleet may humor your need for further confirmation, but it makes no difference to me.”  
  
At that, Julian had trouble biting his tongue for the sake of manners—and perhaps his own hide, given who he was speaking to. “We _don’t_ know,” he said, clipping his words in annoyance. “And we won’t know until the investigation is concluded,” he finished, hoping that would be the end of B’gor’s posturing.  
  
Instead the Klingon harrumphed, following it with a low cackle. “Weak,” he snarled not quite under his breath. “And honorless.”  
  
Julian was about to tell B’gor what he could do with his honor when he was stopped by Tastha’s unusually gentle hand on his arm. She peered up at him with a look full of meaning, and Julian read the message clearly. To B’gor, she said, “Captain, I fear the crew may have misunderstood the proportions of this cargo bay. Would you mind relaying my desire to have just a bit more space between the rows? My old knees, you see. A bit more space would be lovely.” She sounded remarkably feeble and disarming, though Julian saw right through the harmless guise.  
  
B’gor mumbled something to himself, shot Julian another sneer, and then nodded to Tastha and stomped off to find someone who could carry out her request. Julian looked down at her and smiled appreciatively. “Thank you,” he said. “I nearly lost my temper.”  
  
  
“ _Mm,_ ” she hummed. “You may have lost more than that. But we have work to do, and it won’t do to undertake this investigation with an incensed Klingon looming over your shoulder, waiting for an opportunity to bury a dagger in your heart.”  
  
“Oh, I’m certain he would have settled for gravely injuring some other vital organ.”  
  
Tastha rolled her eyes. “And I’m certain you believe that,” she said. “Come. We’ll begin in the section that has already been completed.” She handed Julian a padd and shuffled off toward the indicated area of the cargo bay.  
  
Julian nodded to her back and dutifully followed. Despite his desire to see the truth revealed and everyone’s suspicions confirmed or denied, for better or worse, he was in no great hurry to begin. It wasn’t that he didn’t want the offenders identified and then brought to justice. It was that he knew there was a fair chance that B’gor’s lust for vengeance would actually be validated by his own work. The thought nearly made him nauseous.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Damar sat behind his desk, nursing his throbbing skull with a cup of red leaf tea that had cooled to room temperature hours ago. He was struggling just to keep that much down—he couldn’t even look at the plate of food Nelara had brought him. It was pushed to the far corner of the desk, with a small stack of his office paraphernalia piled around it to block his view. Every so often he was forced to reconstruct the makeshift blind when a piece would slip from the top and land atop the desk with a jarring clatter.  
  
“What do you mean, exactly?” he asked the unfortunate voice on the other end of the comm.  
  
_“Sir, I attempted to place the transmission you requested, but it was refused. They aren’t responding.”_  
  
He expected the Bajorans to be furious, but Shakaar had to know that Damar wasn’t foolish enough to contact him if there wasn’t a good reason. Even in the short time they’d known each other, he had to have picked up on that much, surely? “Did you try again?” he asked, aware of how desperate he must have sounded. Some of it was the hangover, the rest was indeed desperation. “Mark it a priority this time.”  
  
_“I did, sir. And I’ve tried three times, just to be sure. They are refusing all contact from us, it seems. Or—”_  
  
“...Or?” Damar prompted.  
  
_“Or… just you, sir,”_ the voice said.  
  
He wanted to find it petty, but under the circumstances he could hardly begrudge the Bajoran people—especially Shakaar—their spite. He could have kicked himself for believing it was as simple as calling up Shakaar’s office and telling him everything was fine, Kira was possibly still alive, and he had a very strong feeling Sisko wasn’t as heartless as he could have been.  
  
_“Should I try again?”_  
  
“No,” Damar said. “Thank you.”  
  
_“Of course, sir. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.”_  
  
This time Damar remembered to say something _before_ the channel closed. He massaged his temples and frowned at the desktop as though he had just swallowed something unpleasant. “Actually,” he sighed, “I want you to do something else for me.”  
  
Shakaar wouldn’t listen, and Damar understood that now. Likewise, he harbored no illusions that his “friends” at Starfleet Command would extend him any favors until they knew for certain that Damar hadn’t ordered the murder of three dozen Bajorans. That left him with very few avenues of assistance he could pursue, but there was _one_. Someone he was sure would listen to him, even if everyone else had turned their backs, and even if it meant suffering a small personal sacrifice to do so.  
  
“I want you to contact Deep Space Nine. I need to speak to Doctor Bashir.”


	2. Chapter 2

_“It's a fine theory, Damar, but that's all it is. A theory.”_

“I understand that it may seem far-fetched, but—”

Bashir cut him off with a sharp laugh. _“Forgive me if I feel that’s something of an understatement!”_

“Doctor, I’ve told you everything about my encounter with Captain Sisko. I held nothing back. You know him better than I do, does this seem like something he would condone? Do you truly believe he would allow Kira to die, knowing that it was going to happen? And for what?” he demanded. “It’s no better than killing her himself!“

They both knew better than to believe Sisko would so callously disregard Kira’s life. He valued those who served under him, and took the responsibility of leadership seriously, the way any good commander would. Were they meant to believe that he had then taken whatever power the Prophets shared with him and used it to teach Damar a lesson about responsibility at the cost of Kira’s life?

No, he couldn’t accept that, and he refused to believe that Bashir would, either.

 _“I admit, it does seem a bit cruel when you put it that way,”_ Bashir said. _“But even so, the evidence speaks for itself: all three ships were completely destroyed. Unless the attackers took everyone captive—”_

“What if they did?” Damar asked, anxiously grasping at the suggestion. It was certainly better than anything he had come up with so far. “Has your investigation of the wreckage turned up any remains?”

Again, the doctor seemed unable to mount an immediate defense of his own position. _“Not yet,”_ he admitted. He rolled his eyes at Damar’s satisfied smirk. _“Alright,”_ he said, conceding the point with a gesture of surrender, _“assuming you’re correct, and Kira and the others_ are _alive, we still have no way of knowing who is responsible, or where they’ve gone. Without that, we may as well be grasping at straws. It could be anyone. Anyone with a grudge against Cardassia.”_

He didn’t have to say more than that, Damar understood better than anyone that the list of Cardassia’s potential enemies was much longer than that of her allies. “It’s somewhere to begin, at least.”

Bashir set his chin in his hand and sighed. _“Very well. What would you like me to do?”_ he asked.

He had been hoping Bashir would ask that _very_ question. “I’d like you to contact Captain Sisko. He may not have played a part in setting up the murder of three dozen innocent Bajorans, but I refuse to believe he didn’t know something about what was going to happen.”

 _“Why not speak to him yourself?”_  

“I’ve tried reaching out to Bajor on my own, but it’s no use.”

 _“I see. Well, I can certainly try,"_  Bashir said, _"but what makes you think I’ll have any more success than you did?”_

“You aren’t me.”

 _“Fair point. However,_ _the captain has isolated himself and his family. It won’t be easy to reach him. Although… I know someone who may have an easier time of it than either of us.”_ He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. _“Damar, all else aside, I want you to know that I understand how you feel. To a certain extent, anyway. If I thought I’d lost Ezri… Well, let’s just say I’d go to any lengths to find her if I believed she might still be alive.”_

After an uncomfortable amount of time spent staring at distances he couldn't see beyond his own walls, Damar cleared his throat and muttered, “Thank you.” Guilt had lodged itself deep within his chest, insisting upon an explanation for his behavior and the time it had taken him to get himself together. But what could be said about his lapse in judgment, or the precious time he had wasted indulging in self-pity and kanar? What excuses could he offer, even if Bashir somehow had any knowledge of those things? He should have seen it sooner, and it should have been more than his feelings for Kira that opened his eyes to the truth—if it was the truth, and not simply a desperate grasp at whatever would stop his sudden and rather terrifying fall from grace.

Unaware of Damar’s inner turmoil, Bashir reached out and let his hand hover over the button to close the channel. _“I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything,”_ he said. _“For what it’s worth, I sincerely hope this theory of yours turns out to be correct.”_

The screen went black, and silence rushed in to fill the space left by their conversation. Damar let himself slide down in his seat until his chin rested on his chest. He was strangely exhausted for having spent the better part of three days unconscious on the floor of his office.

As if to underscore his weakness, an empty kanar bottle on the floor somewhere shifted and fell on its side with a soft clink.

 

*

 

Julian patiently recounted his conversation with Damar while Ezri ate her lunch across the table from him. When he was finished he sat back and waited for her reaction, and any advice she might have regarding the situation. He hoped she—and especially her three lifetimes of experience as Captain Sisko’s friend—could offer some insight that he and Damar might have missed. Instead she picked at her lunch while staring pensively at the tabletop, and as the minutes passed in silence Julian found himself growing more and more anxious for her feedback. After some time he couldn’t help himself, and he asked, “So? What do you think?”

“I think you’re right, it’s definitely bizarre,” she said finally. “Under any other circumstances I would say Damar was in complete denial. Which makes sense, given what’s happened. But...”

“But?”

She looked up and gave him a lopsided frown. “He might actually have a point. I mean, this is Benjamin we’re talking about. He dropped everything at a pretty crucial point in the war when I—when _Jadzia_ was killed,” she said, rolling her eyes at her own slip-up. They were becoming less frequent as time passed, but every now and then she still seemed to lose track of exactly who she was. Julian tried not to call attention to it. “If Damar is telling the truth about his orb experience,” she continued, “then that means Ben knew what was about to happen, and he didn’t do anything to stop it. Does that sound like him?”

“That was Damar’s argument. More or less.”

Ezri set her fork down and folded her hands together on the tabletop. “And you’re right, it should be me who contacts him.”

“Excellent. In the meantime, I suppose I ought to continue my work with Doctor Tastha. Make it appear as though we still believe all hands aboard the Bajoran vessels perished in the attack. I may even uncover something that lends further credit to Damar’s theory.”

“That’s a good idea. Do you think you can trust Tastha with this?” Ezri asked.

Julian thought about it. He wanted to believe that he could; Tastha had kept Damar’s secret in the hospital, after all. But they had never learned the identity of the attempted assassin. Deep down he hoped that he could place his faith in a fellow doctor, but under the current circumstances that seemed dangerously naïve. “I think it’s best if we keep this to ourselves,” he said. “For now. The fewer people who know, the easier it will be for us to conduct our inquiry in secret, and keep secure what little evidence there is. If the situation is as Damar believes, then we’re facing a potential conspiracy to undermine his administration, and perhaps even instigate another war. Whoever is responsible won’t be happy to learn we’re poking our noses into their business.”

Ezri leaned in close and whispered, “You don’t think it could have been Section 31, do you?”

Julian shook his head as he reached for a piece of fruit on her plate. “The thought crossed my mind, but I can’t imagine what they would stand to gain from destroying what’s left of the Cardassian people. Especially when the economic fallout from the war is doing a fine job of that on its own. Section 31 claim only to protect the interests of the Federation. As it currently stands Cardassia is no threat to us, not unless the government finally collapses entirely, which is exactly what this could accomplish. In fact, it would only serve the Federation to have them on our side and, in a way, indebted to us once they’re back on their feet again.”

“Well,” Ezri said with a sigh, pushing what was left of her lunch across the table and in front of Julian. “In that case, our list of suspects is only the rest of the Alpha Quadrant.”

“I think we can safely eliminate Bajor, at least,” he said.

“The worst part is, I’m not actually sure we can. As bad as it sounds, who else has more of a reason to want to see Cardassia on its knees?”

Julian found the thought unsettled him in a way he hadn’t expected. He wondered if there were still Bajorans who would be so opposed to any sort of alliance with Cardassia that they would murder their own people just to see it crushed. As much as he wanted to believe in the essentially good nature of others, if the cost of seeing Cardassia in ruin was no more than a few dozen lives, there were possibly some who would view the price as fair. Extremists thrived in times of unrest, and the decision to aid the Cardassians had caused its share of discontent among the people of Bajor. Ultimately he realized she was right: under the circumstances, Bajor was rather high on the list of suspects.

Ezri must have seen how much it bothered him, because she quickly switched to another topic. “I talked to Worf yesterday," she said cheerfully. "He told me he’s advised Martok not to order any action against Cardassia until we know exactly what happened, and who’s responsible. Which is great, except I think it’s only because he believes he owes Damar a life debt for freeing the two of us from the Dominion.” She paused. “I guess it’s better than nothing, though.”

“Good, that’s… very good,“ Julian muttered absently. In all his contemplation of the various factors adding to the urgency of the situation, one fleeting detail had floated to the surface. Something he had overlooked when Damar first mentioned it during their conversation. “Damar told me he’d dismissed his head of security,” he said abruptly.

“Why would he do that?”

“He didn’t say, but it must have happened shortly after their return to Cardassia.”

Ezri frowned. “Well, that’s unfortunate—depending on how you felt about Kren, anyway—but what does it have to do with everything else?”

“Maybe nothing by itself,” Julian said, “but Kren’s absence could make it that much easier for someone, maybe even those responsible for the attack on Kira’s convoy, to carry out a successful attempt on Damar’s life.”

“Assuming it’s all the work of the same people, and that’s their ultimate goal.”

“I think we have to assume it is, don’t you? Going after the Bajorans was meant to hurt the Cardassian Union, to separate them from their nearest ally. It was incredibly effective at isolating them from outside assistance. But to truly break them, to pave the way for future conquest or maybe even destroy them entirely, they would have to eliminate Damar, too. The simplest way to do that is to kill him. It only makes sense that this is part of a plot to weaken his position and remove him from power without making him a martyr. Think about it: everything that has happened—the poison, the assassination attempts since his return, the Bajoran ships—it could all be connected. I’d say it’s unlikely they _aren’t_ connected. I’m not sure why I never thought of it before.”

Ezri’s brow furrowed thoughtfully and she sat up a little straighter. “Then Damar is in even more danger than he was before.”

“Exactly.”

“And if he dies—”

“Then if Kira and the other Bajoran officers really _are_ alive, I doubt they’ll remain that way for long.”

 

*

 

Damar glared furiously at the screen, wishing that just once he could bend the laws of reality and reach through to throttle the doctor. “I will not abandon my people in the face of a crisis!” he shouted.

 _“It isn’t a crisis yet,”_ Bashir said patiently, _“but it is poised to become one, and by the time that happens_ _it may be too late to get you to safety. Now, I’ve already dispatched the_ Defiant _to retrieve you. It should arrive in a day or so.”_

“ _Retrieve me?_ I am not a parcel, Bashir! You cannot just abduct me at will when it suits you!”

Bashir leaned in close to the screen, and for the first time that Damar could recall, he was absent all of the boyish qualities that often made him so insufferable. His mouth was a firm line, and his eyes were hard. _“You have no security to speak of, and I imagine if your would-be assassins don’t know that already, they will soon. How long do you think it will take them to get through the handful of guards around you?”_ he asked, his voice low and steady. _“You are in danger. You were in danger before you carelessly dismissed your head of security, but at least Kren seemed to be on top of things, since you've managed to live this long. Right now those whom you can count on for help number in the low digits, and you cannot afford to turn away the ones who have an interest in keeping you alive. This is about more than just your pride, and you know that. So please, do me this one courtesy, Legate Damar: shut up and accept my help, before someone slips an explosive in with your next order of kanar.”_

Damar was too stunned to respond, and for a minute he forgot that he was speaking to a man he had once daydreamed about drowning in a small pond. Composing himself quickly, he said, “I suppose there is _some_ merit to your concerns. And I assume you’re going to tell me that I should keep this to myself, as well.”

_“That would be wise.”_

“Perhaps I should have expected this sort of thing when I agreed to become a puppet for the Federation.”

Bashir shook his head. _“Don’t take it personally, I can be quite persuasive when lives on are on the line. I am a doctor, after all.”_ At that he relaxed in his chair and inclined his head with an air of satisfied authority. It was impressive, even by Cardassian standards—at least until he ruined it with an annoying, adolescent grin. _“Expect the Defiant by 2200 hours tomorrow,”_ he said. _“I’ll have your government-in-exile set up for you by the time you arrive.”_

“And you really believe I’ll be any safer aboard the station?” Damar asked.

_“Well, so far no one has attempted to assassinate you here.”_

“That we know of.”

 

 

Eventually Nelara called on him again, whether for some actual purpose or just to make sure he hadn’t changed his mind and decided to drink himself into oblivion. At first she hovered near the door, and Damar wondered just how difficult he had been while he was drinking; he didn’t have a very clear memory of most of it. When she finally stepped into the room she approached his desk cautiously, making her way around the bottles that littered the floor. When she stopped just shy of his desk Damar waved her closer. “The _Defiant_ is on its way here,” he said, careful to keep his voice low. A lifetime of living under the watchful eye of the Obsidian Order had taught him not to trust the sanctity of even the most private spaces. “It will arrive tomorrow evening.”

She seemed alarmed at first, and asked, “Why?”

“I can’t tell you that. All you need to know is that I am acting in Cardassia’s best interests by going with them.”

“Where are they taking you?”

“It’s best if you don’t know any more than I’ve already told you.” Privately he enjoyed flaunting Bashir’s advice, but his intentions in doing so were genuine; leaving Nelara alone could place her in danger, and he wanted to be sure that she was aware of that before she agreed to take part in concealing his absence. “I only need you to keep things under control here. Keep the Civil Assembly at bay. Can you do that?”

For a moment it seemed as if she might argue, and Damar wondered if he had made a mistake telling her his plans. She looked down at the floor and started to shake her head, swallowing back what he imagined must have been a great deal of apprehension. Finally, after what seemed like forever, she raised her head again and nodded. “I can do that,” she said.

“Good.”

“If that’s all, sir—”

“There is something else, actually,” he said. Leaning to the side he inclined his head in the direction of the broken and discarded kanar bottles lying about the room. “I could use your help clearing these out of here.” He wanted them gone; out of sight where they could no longer haunt him with blurry half-memories of his own poor judgment.

Nelara looked back at the mess and politely said, “ _Ah,_ ” as if she could have crossed the room before without noticing.

They started to clean, and Damar tried to think of it as the herald of a second—or perhaps third—chance. He really had begun with the best of intentions, for all that it mattered now. He wanted to tell her that, to apologize for how things had turned out. Maybe it wasn’t all his fault, and maybe it was, but the Cardassian people deserved better than what they were getting, regardless of their numerous mistakes in the past. He was supposed to have been the one who rescued them from their fate, and instead it seemed as though his presence had only drawn more hardship down upon his already beaten people. What was his response to his first true test of leadership?

He drank.

“This isn’t what you expected, is it,” he said, carefully lining his collection of bottles along one side of the desk.

“I _have_ been keeping track of your kanar orders, sir, I had a rough idea of the number of—”

“No, not the kanar. This,” Damar said, gesturing to the room that wasn’t his, in the house that had no owner. “I’m sure you thought I would be able to do more for Cardassia than I have.”

“Sir… I didn’t have any expectations,” Nelara replied quietly. “I’m only doing my job.”

As much as he doubted her answer, he accepted it, and let the subject rest there. He bent down to pick up another bottle and the glass slipped from his fingers, landing on another that Nelara had been reaching for and shattering both. The jagged edge sliced through her palm, leaving a dark line that began to bleed profusely. It stained the carpet and then her top as she jumped back and clutched her hand to her chest.

“Are you alright?” Damar asked, reaching for her injured hand. “I’m sorry—”

“ _It’s fine!_ ” she hissed. She pulled away from him when he tried to reach for her. “I’m fine,” she said more calmly. “I just—I just need a dermal regenerator.”

“Let me see,” Damar insisted. He held out his hand, and after a moment she gave in and placed her upright palm in his. The blood on her fingers soaked into the sleeve of his jacket almost immediately, turning the dark brown fabric even darker. He paid it no mind. There was a shard of spiraled glass embedded in the wound, and he carefully plucked it out with only a small yelp of pain from Nelara. “There,” he announced confidently. “ _Now_ you only need a dermal regenerator.”

When he released her hand she quickly cradled it in her uninjured fingers, and backed away in the direction of the door. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’ll have this taken care of.”

“Of course. I can finish the rest of this on my own, I should have done it myself, anyway,” he said.

Giving a vague imitation of a bow, she turned and nearly fled from the room, disappearing before the two halves could slide shut again. The tail end of her braid was the last thing he saw before the door closed.

 

*

 

Julian spotted Tastha shuffling through Ops just as one of the on-duty officers tried to stop her. He couldn’t hear the resulting argument, but the officer definitely came away the loser, and Tastha continued her determined march up the steps and into the captain’s office without bothering to wait for an invitation.

“Good morning,” Julian said cheerfully. He had been up all night, and felt hard-pressed to find anything positive about the hour, but for Tastha’s sake—and his own—he feigned a pleasant mood. “I trust you slept well?”

“ _I_ did,” Tastha frowned. “What do you have to say for yourself?” she asked, clearly not fooled by the chipper facade.

With a helpless half-smile Julian said, “I never actually expected to be in command of this station.” He held his hands up as though he had no idea what else to say.

Something of his frustration must have shone through his attempt at levity, because Tastha’s hard frown softened, and her shoulders slumped. “You feel responsible for uncovering the identity of your friend's killers,” she said. “I do understand. But you need your own rest, or you'll be no good to anyone.”

For only an instant Julian was tempted to confide in her. To simply explain everything he had learned and everything they had speculated over, in the hopes that maybe she would have some answers where the rest of them were left guessing at theories and chasing down scraps of evidence in secret. Ezri was still trying to contact Captain Sisko, Damar was on his way back to the station, and Julian was sitting in Ops, desperately trying to hold things together while he waited for _something_ to happen that would give them a place to start looking for real answers. He would have accepted any progress at that moment, no matter the source.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t tell Tastha anything, even though he truly wanted to. “Yes,” he half-lied. “That’s it exactly.”

He wasn’t sure what made him think she would actually believe him.

“What else has you so worried?” she asked, narrowing her eyes skeptically. They nearly disappeared in the many wrinkles that lined her face, giving her the appearance of a very weathered tree.

“As much as I’d like to, I really can’t talk about it. I’m sorry.”

“Can’t, or _won’t?_ ” Tastha demanded. She folded her arms and frowned down at him. Julian found himself wondering if it mattered to her whether she was standing above someone when she lectured them, or if she actually enjoyed striking terror into people twice her size. Probably the latter.

“Can’t. Really. It’s… a security matter,” he said, searching for the right word. “I’m sure you understand.”

Her deepening frown said she didn’t, but she appeared to accept his answer nevertheless. “I suppose I’ll head to the cargo bay and get started by myself, then. You’ll join me later? I don't intend to do all of this by myself, you know. Station business or not.”

“You have my word.”

She turned around and shuffled back out of the room, shaking her head and muttering to herself. Julian smiled as he watched her go, and then chuckled quietly at the path that cleared before her as she crossed to the turbolift.

 

*

 

Damar was busy packing for his impromptu leave of absence when a voice came over the comm to inform him that he had an incoming transmission from Bajor. He paused to wonder who on Bajor would want—would be _willing_ —to speak to him given the current situation. “Put it through,” he ordered.

The screen on the wall blinked to life to show Shakaar, who appeared as though he had been carved from stone. A wide, white landscape filled the window behind him; it was apparently snowing in Bajor’s capital. Damar couldn't think of a better accompaniment to Shakaar's icy stare.  _“Legate,”_ he greeted.

“First Minister,” Damar responded in kind. He didn’t have to wonder what had happened to put them back on such formal terms with one another. “I’m surprised, I didn’t expect to hear from you.” He left _ever again_ off the end, though it certainly would have been appropriate.

_“I thought about not answering. Not sure I shouldn’t have followed my instincts, but there's no sense worrying about that now. What is it you want?”_

Damar weighed his options quickly. He could waste time with formalities, expressing his condolences and hinting at his hopes for continued good relations between their people. It would echo his statement to the newscasts and certainly strike the proper political chord, whether or not it truly meant anything. Shakaar might even pretend he appreciated the sentiment, and lie about the possibility of continuing diplomatic relations between the two worlds. But that wouldn't give Damar the answers he needed, nor would it get him any closer to Sisko. “I had nothing to do with it, you know that,” he said. “And I _will_ find whoever was responsible.” He mentioned nothing of his hope that he would also find the supposedly dead Bajorans; his own arrogance halted just shy of flaunting Bashir’s advice when there was a good chance the conversation could be intercepted by a third party.

Shakaar’s jaw flexed a few times and he looked around the space behind his own viewscreen. _“I know,”_ he said. _“But it doesn’t change anything.”_

“I didn’t expect it would.”

_“Then what do you actually want from me?”_

Asking Shakaar for a favor, with everything else that was happening—it seemed like something only a madman would do. But he had few alternatives, and no way to know if Bashir had been successful in his attempts to reach the captain. “I need to speak to Sisko,” he said in one great rush.

Just as Damar had predicted, Shakaar looked at him as though he had completely lost his mind. _“What makes you think I’m going to help you do that? Even_ if _I thought I could.”_

“Duty to your people, and to the continued peace of the Alpha Quadrant.” It was a bigger gamble than Damar was comfortable taking, but he had run out of ideas.

_“Right. In which case, what could possibly compel me to do a favor for the leader of Cardassia, whose people recently slaughtered three dozen loyal Bajorans? Bajorans who were on a mission of peace, in case you forgot.”_

Damar clenched his fists and forced himself to take a deep breath. “They haven’t determined that yet,” he said, his voice tight from the strain of holding back his anger. "I'm only asking you to put me in contact with him. Nothing more."

Shakaar leaned back in his chair and watched Damar through the viewscreen for what felt like hours. _“No,”_ he said finally. _“I won’t violate the Emissary’s privacy. I'm not even sure the Vedeks would let me. I’m sympathetic to your situation, but I would be burned in effigy if I helped you right now.”_

“I didn’t realize you were running for reelection,” Damar snapped without thinking.

The transmission ended before he could fully appreciate how stupid that had been.


	3. Chapter 3

The docking hatch rolled aside, sliding neatly into the bulkhead and opening the way for passage onto the station. Behind Damar walked Lieutenant R’nel and a handful of the _Defiant’s_ crew. Awaiting them up ahead was Nog, with his arms clasped behind his back and his eyes fixed firmly on the wall. He was accompanied by six very stern looking security personnel.  
  
Before Damar could even speak Nog held up a small hand to stop him. “ _Don’t_ ,” he snapped.  
  
“Well, that isn’t exactly the warm welcome I expected,” Damar said. He fixed Nog with a cocky, condescending smile. The kind that was meant to remind him of his place. It felt hollow, and he straightened the cuffs of his sleeves and shrugged to mask his own discomfort. “But I’ll make this simple for both of us; I know my way around the station. I’m sure the lieutenant can escort me if it’s absolutely necessary to have a chaperon.” He started down the corridor toward his usual quarters, paying no mind to the dozen or so people he left behind.  
  
“You aren’t going there,” Nog said, hurrying to keep up.  
  
“Where am I going, then?” Damar laughed, “The holding cells?” He could imagine Bashir rationalizing the necessity of keeping him completely safe from harm by locking him away behind a forcefield. It might have been funnier if not for the strong possibility he had at least thought of it.  
  
The sidelong glare he received said that if it had been up to Nog, that’s exactly where their journey would end. After a while he turned a corner ahead of Damar and said, “You’re here,” and slapped his hand on a nearby panel as the party came to an abrupt stop. The door slid open to reveal a small room facing the station’s central core.  
  
Damar marched over and thrust his head through the doorway. “You can’t possibly be serious.”  
  
“It’s not a _holding cell_ , at least.” Despite his frown, the little Ferengi seemed very pleased with himself at the sight of Damar’s disappointment. “The quarters you were in last time are currently occupied by a _guest_ ,” he continued, lingering on the last word a bit longer than necessary. “I’m sure you understand.”  
  
The officer tasked with carrying Damar’s bag slipped past and stepped into the room, where he placed his burden on the only chair in sight. It seemed intended to double as both a dining chair and the replacement for a couch. Damar followed him inside, and it became instantly apparent that the room was only meant for a single occupant at a time. “Tell me, Lieutenant,” he said to Nog, “did you have anything to do with choosing my accommodations?”  
  
“I’m sure you won’t need anything more from me, since you know your way around _so well_.” Nog stepped to the side so the officer could exit Damar’s “quarters” when he was finished. “Welcome to Deep Space Nine.”  
  
Nog immediately turned and marched away down the corridor, taking most of the arrival party with him. Only two of the six security officers remained, and Damar watched them take their places on either side of his door without a word. He hadn't failed to notice that they were both Bajoran Militia. Deciding to forgo making things worse for himself by trying to speak to either of them, or giving them more of an opportunity to stare and scowl at him, he reached for the panel and closed the door. What little privacy it afforded him was better than none at all, though not by much. Given the size of the room he was almost certain that any noise he made would be heard easily from outside.  
  
He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it across the chair before making his way to the smaller room that contained the bed and the adjacent lavatory—neither constituting a _room_ in any true sense, but each space did have its own door, at least. As he stepped around the fixtures and tried to angle himself in front of the sink, Damar became convinced that the quarters had, at least originally, been a storage closet. No Cardassian architect with any sense would include a space so small with the intention of anyone actually staying there. Even unwanted guests were treated with more courtesy.  
  
So, he reflected, this was his lot now; a barely-tolerated pariah kept out of sight in a box where he couldn’t cause any trouble. It wasn’t entirely surprising, given the circumstances that had brought him there, and in any other situation he might have found the dedication to his misery admirable. With another deep sigh, Damar splashed some warm water on his face and reached for a towel—only to find there were none. A search of the two small drawers along the wall revealed that they were also empty. “Wonderful,” he groused.  
  
The door sounded a visitor, and Damar called for whoever it was to enter.  
  
“It’s only me,” Bashir said cheerfully. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to…” He stopped. “I wasn’t aware we even _had_ quarters this small on the station.”  
  
“I’m sure Nog can enlighten you about its origins,” Damar muttered from behind his sleeve as he dried his face.  
  
“ _Ah._ ”  
  
He finished in the washroom and stepped back out into the bedroom. It was so small that he was practically standing next to Bashir already. “It’s alright,” he said. “I’m sure he’s not the only one unhappy to see me back here.”  
  
“You’re referring to the guards outside, I presume?”  
  
“I’d guess that they’re not among my many admirers. Wasn’t the point of all this to keep me from being assassinated? I thought I was coming here in secret.”  
  
“Despite your misgivings, Damar, I have absolute confidence in the discretion and capabilities of deputies Tellaro and Vezra. You can count on them to keep you safe.”  
  
“I’m sure they’re pleased to hear you say that,” Damar said sarcastically, gesturing to the door less than two meters away. He reached for his bag and started to remove the few articles of clothing he had brought with him. When he realized there was nowhere to put them, he mumbled his displeasure and began stuffing them back in again. “Could you at least find me somewhere else to stay?” he asked.  
  
“I’ll look into it. In the meantime, you should know that we’ve been unable to reach Captain Sisko at his home. It seems he was very serious about keeping himself and his family secluded for the time being. I thought perhaps I could try contacting First Minister Shakaar, instead.”  
  
Damar smiled bitterly at his own cascading misfortune. “I very much doubt he’ll help you once he learns you’re working with me.”  
  
“Well, that’s why I’m not going to _tell_ him that I’m working with you.”  
  
“That’s an unusually deceitful plan for a Starfleet officer.”  
  
Bashir beamed as though that had been genuine praise. “Yes, I’m quite proud of it myself,” he said.  
  
It took some time for Damar to punch his clothing back into the bag, but it had the unintended effect of relieving some of his stress. When he was finished he closed the bag again and shoved it over—where it became wedged between the bed and the wall. He let it stay; it was as useful there as anywhere else. “Was there something more you wanted from me?” he asked Bashir, who had only watched the whole ordeal silently.  
  
“Oh—well,” Bashir stammered. “No, I suppose not. Did you…” He made some vague gestures with his hands, and then let his arms drop to his sides. He lowered his voice and asked, “Did you want to talk at all? About… Colonel Kira.”  
  
Damar peered at the doctor. Was Bashir trying to _console him?_ “Why?” he demanded.  
  
“I just imagined it would be difficult for you to confide in anyone on Cardassia, especially with Kren gone.” He stopped and pinched his brow together in confusion. “Why _did_ you dismiss him, by the way?”  
  
“Because he kept pestering me about Kira.”  
  
Bashir started to nod, and then his common sense finally caught up. “Oh.”  
  
“Besides that, what reason would I have to discuss her as if she were gone, when we both know she isn’t.”  
  
“Well, we don’t _really_ know—”  
  
“ _I_ know,” Damar insisted.  
  
Bashir at least had the sense to leave well enough alone following that, and he seemed poised to excuse himself, but then something else stopped him. “Actually, there was something I thought might be of interest to you. Though I’m not sure you’re going to be very pleased to hear it.”  
  
Damar held his hand out to invite Bashir’s bad news. It seemed unlikely there was anything the doctor could say that might drive his mood any lower than it already was.  
  
“We’ve concluded the first part of our investigation, and confirmed that the Bajorans ships were destroyed by Cardassian weapons.”  
  
He was wrong, as usual; a darker place yet remained. “You’re certain of this?” he asked.  
  
“Completely certain,” Bashir said. “Apart from some minor anomalies we’ve yet to pin down, the evidence is conclusive.” He spared Damar an apologetic frown. “I’m sorry, this probably isn’t what you needed to hear right now. I can’t imagine it will make your dealings with the Council of Ministers any easier.”  
  
“You mean you’re going to tell them?”  
  
“Of course I’m going to tell them,” Bashir said. “And Starfleet, too. Do you expect me to lie?”  
  
“You know what will happen if you submit a report on your findings.”  
  
“What do you expect will happen if I don’t? That they’ll just accept the excuse that we haven’t found anything? _‘Sorry, we’ve decided to take our time, rather than rush things.’_ Even if I were willing to overlook my ethical responsibilities, Doctor Tastha isn’t going to—”  
  
“ _She’s_ here?”  
  
“Doctor Tastha isn’t going to falsify her own report—nor would I ask her to if I were you,” Bashir said. He was clearly offended by the mere _suggestion_ that they might do anything to deviate from proper procedure.  
  
Damar stepped over to the window, which did little to distance him from Bashir. “Delay it, then. Just give me time.” _Time to do what?_ he wondered. He shook his head and sighed; even his own conscience betrayed him now. “Once we’ve found Kira and the others it won’t matter that the attackers were Cardassian.”  
  
“You _have_ time, Damar. That’s what I’ve bought you by bringing you here. Time to help us work through this before it’s too late.”  
  
“If you submit that report, it will _be_ too late. The Klingons are already at our doorstep—”  
  
“The Klingons aren’t going to do anything unless Worf withdraws his petition to the High Council,” Bashir said. “He won’t do that.”  
  
“ _Worf?_ ” Damar looked at the doctor as though he’d just casually informed him that Dukat was in the other room. “Why would he help me?”  
  
“Oh, something about you turning on the Dominion and saving the lives of two Starfleet officers who were about to be executed. Does that sound familiar?”  
  
Of course, the Klingon insistence upon honor. Worf owed Damar a life debt—or so he undoubtedly felt. Damar wasn’t about to insist otherwise. “Will they listen to him?”  
  
“Not forever, but at the moment they seem willing to restrain their enthusiasm on the advice of the Federation ambassador, who also happens to be a member of Chancellor Martok’s own house. The Klingons will not engage in any direct military action against Cardassia in the meantime.”  
  
“I never thought I’d owe thanks to a Klingon,” Damar said.  
  
“I highly suspect you’ll owe thanks to more than a few people by the time this is finished. And if that’s all, you’ll be getting off light.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
“You’re late. You said you’d only be gone a few minutes. It’s been twenty.”  
  
Julian ducked his head in apology and reached for one of the modified tricorders next to Tastha. They were programmed to scan only for Bajoran biosigns, and so finely calibrated that Julian had picked up a dozen false readings from Tastha standing on the opposite side of the cargo bay before he learned not to aim carelessly. If there was any organic matter to be found in the debris, the tricorders would locate it. It lifted his spirits considerably that so far there had been nothing to suggest that the crewmen perished along with their ships. Tastha found it troubling, but to Julian it was the best he could have hoped for.  
  
“I don’t suppose you found anything interesting while I was away?” he asked, already aware that the answer would be no.  
  
“Nothing. Although I did learn from Nurse Thazshrao that you have a girlfriend you haven’t introduced me to. I expect to meet her before I leave.”  
  
Julian made a mental note to remind his staff not to share details of his personal life. Though it was entirely possible that Ezri would enjoy Tastha’s company; Jadzia and Curzon had been quite fond of Klingons, and Tastha was about as pugilistic as the most decorated warrior of the empire. “I’ll be sure to let her know of your expectations,” he said.  
  
After a stretch of silence she asked, “Is that where you were?”  
  
He finished another piece of debris and moved on to the next one. Neither showed signs of biological matter, and they were both segments of an interior bridge bulkhead. That was a very good sign. “No, actually. Although it certainly would have been more enjoyable, I’m sure.”  
  
“Work in the infirmary?”  
  
Julian stopped scanning and turned to her. Was she attempting to pry information out of him? “It was a personal matter,” he said, hoping that an uninviting tone might spell the end of her questions. He should have known better.  
  
“Are you feeling ill?” she persisted.  
  
“It’s—no, I am feeling quite well. Perhaps we should focus on our—”  
  
“What are you trying to hide from me? Is it something to do with this investigation?” Tastha stood up—which did little to increase her height—and put a hand on her hip in the most motherly fashion he could imagine. In her other hand was the tricorder, which she pointed at him like an accusing finger. “If it is, I expect you to tell me.” She indicated each of them with the tricorder, and it beeped excitedly every time it turned her way. “I want the truth from you.”  
  
“It’s nothing. Really.”  
  
“You wouldn’t work so hard to keep nothing from me. Be honest, is it related to what we’re doing here?”  
  
He had no good answer to that; nothing that wasn’t an outright lie, and he sincerely did not wish to lie to Tastha. Not in the least because he was certain she would see right through it, but also because he truly did respect her. She had placed her trust in him a few times already, and the least he could do was not reward that with complete betrayal.  
  
But Tastha didn’t seem at all concerned with preserving their friendship. She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head back in a way that said she knew _exactly_ what the answer to her question was, and she was not the least bit pleased about it.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Damar had been lying in his bed for several hours already when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to sleep. He couldn’t, not with the thought of Kira trapped somewhere, held prisoner by someone who wanted to destroy him or the Cardassian Union—or both. Bashir had assured him that simply being on the station was enough to help keep her safe, but that wasn’t really true. His unknown enemies might not have the reach to strike at him while he was there, but that wouldn’t stop them from harming the three dozen Bajorans they were holding captive. Even if it kept them alive, he had enough experience with prisoners of war to know that alive and whole were two very different things.  
  
Without even realizing he had left the bed, he began to pace—no small feat in the cramped quarters he’d been provided. Where could they have gone? If the goal was to ruin him, to undermine his leadership and bring the wrath of the Alpha Quadrant down on the Union, why not simply kill the Bajorans outright, as everyone already believed they had done? What he _knew_ for certain clashed violently with what made sense, and Damar’s frustration mounted until he was stomping back and forth from one wall to the other. At one point the door chime interrupted his furious pacing, and he answered to find his guards standing with phaser pistols at the ready. After assuring them that he was fine, and there was no intruder to subdue, they returned to their posts and he closed the door again. Following that incident he attempted to keep the noise generated by his anger to a minimum, but it proved extremely difficult. At least he knew for certain that Bashir had been telling the truth about the deputies he selected.  
  
Near what he assumed to be morning the door chimed again, but this time it wasn’t the Bajoran deputies on the other side. It was a short, hunched figure wrapped in layers of knitwork that draped about her like the boughs of an ancient tree. Damar didn’t even bother to greet her, he simply made a defeated sound and stepped aside to allow her space to trundle into the room.  
  
“This is cozy,” Tastha observed as she made herself comfortable in his only chair. “I’ll have a cup of tea.”  
  
Damar refrained from asking if there were any other beverages on Bajor; he knew better than to taunt the disagreeable crone. He procured her cup of tea and set it on the table next to her. “What can I do for you?” he asked in his most practiced diplomatic voice.  
  
“Well, to begin with, you can tell me what you’re doing here when you have a brewing crisis to deal with back on your homeworld.”  
  
How had she even learned that he was aboard the station? “I came at the behest of Doctor Bashir, in part because of that crisis,” he said. “I don’t think it’s wise to say any more on the matter than that.”  
  
“I know _why_ you’re here. What I want to know is why you’re here when you should be scouring every meter of the Cardassian Union for those missing crewmen. And,” she continued, pausing only to take a delicate sip of tea, “why you two saw fit to waste my time and contribute to the slow decline of my knees by making me scan piece after piece of that wreckage, when you were so sure there was nothing to find.”  
  
“We had to know for certain. And at least according to Bashir, it was still important to determine that the ships were destroyed by Cardassian weapons,” Damar said. “Although I fail to see how that has helped _my_ cause at all.”  
  
“Well, I will give you that much, I suppose. But that still doesn’t satisfy my question.”  
  
The simplest answer was that he had come because Bashir insisted, because he wasn’t safe on Cardassia Prime—due in large part to his own reckless temper. The more complicated and personally confusing answer was that he had felt trapped within that sprawling manor, with its empty rooms and silent hallways, and he accepted the first opportunity to escape. And because he couldn’t simply sit back and wait for someone to find Kira and the others while he did nothing. But what he said to Tastha was, “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”  
  
She took another sip of her tea and bobbed her head in understanding. “I suppose that makes sense; you seem to be that sort of man.”  
  
_Not always_ , he thought. “I don’t suppose you would mind sharing your assessment with the rest of the Alpha Quadrant. Or perhaps just Bajor.” He would settle for no more than Shakaar, under the circumstances.  
  
“I doubt anyone would listen to me. Besides, they aren’t the Bajorans who matter right now. It’s your girlfriend and her comrades we’re concerned with.”  
  
“She’s not—” Damar started to object, but he stopped himself. Kira _had_ given him the next best thing to a declaration of her feelings, and she seemed serious about continuing whatever it was they had started. And on some level, if he was being truly honest with himself, thinking of her that way made him irrationally happy. Something he greatly needed at the moment.  
  
Tastha continued, heedless of his halted interruption. “You look dehydrated, and that’s saying something for your kind. Have you had enough to drink?” she asked. She sounded deceptively sweet for the first time since she had appeared at his door. It made Damar nervous.  
  
“I’ve had more than enough to drink,” he said.  
  
“I mean proper fluids, not that syrupy muck your people love so much. Have you eaten since you arrived? I don’t know what sort of food they serve the leader of the Cardassian Union, but you don’t look well.” She chuckled and raised her cup. “And I’ve had my hands in your guts, so I know what I’m talking about!”  
  
He leaned away from her and frowned at the uninvited mental image that accompanied her boast. “They feed me just fine,” he said. Probably better than a good portion of the Union, in fact. “And my assistant has forced so much water on me I could probably drown in it. But your concern is appreciated.”  
  
She didn’t seem to like something about his response, though Damar imagined if she had been unhappy with the answer itself, he would be hearing about it already. After a moment of uncomfortable peering she relented and returned to drinking her tea. “At any rate,” she continued, “I’m sure if we put our heads together we can suss out the whereabouts of the missing crewmen. Doctor Bashir is awfully clever, after all.” She set her cup down quickly and put a hand out. “You won’t share that with him, of course. I worry he’ll become overconfident and get ahead of himself.”  
  
Damar felt it was a bit late for that, but he agreed nevertheless.  
  
“Well, in that case, I’ll leave you to get some sleep. You look as if you could use a few peaceful hours.” She pushed her teacup aside and slowly lifted herself to her feet. It took her so long to stand up that Damar wondered if he should offer to help. He knew for a fact that she was capable of crossing a large room at impressive speed, but she seemed to do it by conserving energy at all other times.  
  
“Where are you going now?” he asked. He knew she was involved in the examination of the Bajoran wreckage along with Bashir, but that was all. Had they already submitted their results to the Council of Ministers? He imagined that he might have heard _something_ from either Cardassia or Bajor if that were true. The last he’d checked, the newscasts were all silent.  
  
“I still have work to pretend to do,” Tastha said, chuckling at her own strange joke. “I will come by to check on you again this evening. I expect you to be rested.” She lifted one bony hand to point a finger at his face. “And drink more fluids,” she commanded.  
  
“That’s not necessary,” Damar tried to object, but she waved him off.  
  
“Of course it is,” she said. “I’m still your doctor, after all.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
_“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking at,”_ Miles said. He shrugged and wove his fingers together in his lap. _“This damage was definitely left by Cardassian phasers, you’re not wrong about that. So what’s the problem?”_  
  
“Here.” Julian sent him the second file, the one containing the list of anomalies they had catalogued during their scans. “What do you make of this?”  
  
Miles opened the file and looked through the contents, and his resting scowl deepened the longer he read. Finally he raised his eyebrows and made a sound Julian knew from experience meant that he had encountered something he couldn’t explain. _“I have no idea,”_ he said. _“But I’ll tell you what…”_ He sat forward in his chair and started tapping out commands on the console next to him, pulling up files and skimming technical schematics. _“Here it is, I knew I’d seen something like this before. The third set of scans, it almost looks Romulan, doesn’t it? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was a Keldon’s phasers, only packing the sort of kick you’d get from a Warbird. But I can’t imagine how they’d have gotten their hands on that technology.”_  
  
Julian had a very strong feeling that he knew exactly where it might have come from. “Miles, I do believe you may have just solved this for us.”  
  
_“Well, that’s why you called me, isn’t it?”_ He smiled, but the good cheer disappeared just as quickly. _“Has this got anything to do with what happened to Kira?”_  
  
“I’m not sure it’s wise to discuss the details just yet, but I promise to explain as soon as I’m able.”  
  
Miles scoffed and rolled his eyes. _“Right, like your promise to visit Earth, oh, what was it, six months ago?_ I _may forget eventually, but you can count on Keiko remembering. Take too long and she’ll start calling you herself.”_  
  
“I’ll be sure to set aside some leave,” Julian said. He hadn’t been back to Earth in ages. It was sometimes difficult to imagine that anything existed outside of the often chaotic events that surrounded his life.  
  
_“I suppose you’ve probably got your hands full running the station. Probably won’t have much time for a while, or at least until Starfleet sends you a new commander. That is if the Bajorans don’t want one of their own in her place.”_  
  
It seemed odd to Julian to speak of Kira as if she no longer existed, especially when he had nearly convinced himself that there was simply no way she _wasn’t_ still alive. He had to remind himself that, at least according to everyone else, Kira and the rest of the Bajorans aboard those ships were gone. His own rather callous treatment of the topic must have seemed strange and offputting from the outside. “It’s not as bad as it seems,” he said, hoping the feeble encouragement would help somehow. “In fact, things may be looking up soon.”  
  
_“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m sure you could use a few things going your way right about now. I only wish we could have been there for Kira's memorial. How did the captain seem to you when you saw him?”_  
  
Julian didn’t know how to tell him that there hadn’t _been_ a memorial. That it was only a few days after they heard the news about the attack that Damar had come forward with his theory. He was even less sure how to tell him that the captain hadn’t actually come up from Bajor. A fact that, in retrospect, seemed to lend the most weight to Damar’s belief that Kira and the others were still alive. He simply couldn't imagine Captain Sisko neglecting such an important event. “I’m… I just realized that I’m terribly late for something, do you mind if I catch you up later?” he asked.  
  
_“Sure. Go do your work.”_  
  
“Thank you, Miles. Give everyone my regards, will you?”  
  
_“Of course.”_  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Damar woke with a start, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling that he could have sworn was at least a meter lower than any other room he’d ever been in. It took him a little while to recall that he was on Deep Space Nine, in his bed, which was itself in a room barely larger than a turbolift. He _felt_ rested, but he knew all too well how deceptive a short sleep could be for the first few minutes, until exhaustion settled in again. “Time,” he croaked past a dry throat.  
  
_“The time is 1300 hours, 44 minutes,”_ the computer answered promptly.  
  
Long enough that Tastha wouldn’t have any cause to complain if she did come by again as forewarned. Damar flipped the blanket aside and sat up. He glanced up at the ceiling to verify that it actually was lower than that of a normal room, which only confirmed that he was in a refurbished closet of some kind. He spared a thought for what a spiteful little vole the Ferengi boy was, and then slipped out of the bed. Almost immediately he pitched forward on a collision course with the floor. He was barely able to catch the wall and stop himself before he fell, and for a short time he didn’t dare risk moving again. It was all he could do to keep himself upright as he held on to the door frame, staring at the carpet while it whorled before him. After a while, and with enough blinking, he was able to steady himself and still his vision, and when he was sure it was safe to try again, Damar stood up and left the relative safety of the wall. He gave himself a few cautious seconds before he drew his hands back completely; the dizziness seemed to have subsided.  
  
When nothing else happened he chalked it up to a rush of blood, and put it firmly from his mind.  
  
After he had retrieved his bag from the narrow space between the bed and the wall, Damar fetched something to eat from the replicator, adding a large glass of water to his order. He had decided that perhaps Tastha had a point; it couldn’t hurt him to drink more fluids. After all, the restroom wasn’t exactly far away.  
  
_“Bashir to Damar,”_ the doctor’s voice came over the comm.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
_“I’ve asked the deputies to escort you to Cargo Bay four. They’re waiting for you outside.”_  
  
“Couldn’t they have simply informed me themselves?” he asked.  
  
He could almost hear the grin in Bashir’s answer. _“I thought you might feel more comfortable if you knew the order was coming from me.”_  
  
“How considerate of you.” That was certainly going to make for a pleasant stroll through the station with his escorts. “I’ll be there shortly.”  
  
_“Good. Bashir out.”_


	4. Chapter 4

“The Dominion,” Damar said, doing little to mask his skepticism.  
  
“There was no warp trail,” Bashir explained. “And it's unlikely the attackers were simply lying in wait. But the Bajoran ships didn’t explode on their own, naturally. Which means whoever attacked them had the foresight to conceal their approach and eliminate all signs of their retreat. The most logical conclusion is that the assailants were using a cloak of some kind.” Bashir stepped down from the empty shelf he had been using as a seat, as though he could no longer contain his excitement over the mystery at hand. “Of course, that doesn’t make sense at all, does it? We know the Bajoran ships were destroyed by _Cardassian_ weapons. Nothing adds up—until you take a closer look at those anomalies I mentioned before. Anomalies which show evidence of _Romulan_ technology at work.”  
  
“So, you put together Romulan and Cardassian and came up with… Dominion.”  
  
“The Obsidian Order!” Bashir nearly shouted, his desire for theatrics having been briefly overshadowed by his impatience. “It’s the only answer that makes any sense!”  
  
Damar found Bashir’s excitement and his energy less than contagious, especially taking into account that he had been awake for less than twenty minutes and still felt rather unsteady on his feet. He declined to mention his earlier dizzy spell to either doctor, both for his own sake and because he refused to believe it was anything but his own neglect for his body that had caused it. It was bad enough the two of them lectured him separately, he didn’t need them working in tandem with one another again.  
  
Still, Bashir _was_ trying, at least. “The Dominion destroyed the Order,” he reminded the doctor.  
  
“So we were told, and so we believed," Bashir said. "But think about it: all those ships constructed in total secrecy, far away from the prying eyes of the Detapa Council and the Central Command. Ships which everyone believed had been destroyed in the attack on the Founders’ homeworld. Those ships were outfitted with weapons enhanced by the technology the Tal Shiar shared with the Order. And,” he added, now nearly bouncing on his toes, “supplied with _cloaking devices_.”  
  
_That_ changed matters significantly. “Nothing to track,” Damar said.  
  
“Not unless they knew to look for it, and everyone assumed—”  
  
“Everyone assumed it was us,” Damar finished for him. He thoughtfully spared Bashir the I-told-you-so he felt the doctor deserved, if only because he had somehow managed to stumble upon the breakthrough they had been searching for.  
  
“But why?” Tastha asked.  
  
Bashir shrugged. “Who knows?” He spun on his heel toward her. “Revenge? One last-ditch attempt to finish what they started in the final hours of the war?” He twisted back around and winced apologetically at Damar.  
  
Damar dismissed his concern with a quick gesture. “Were the Founder I had the misfortune of serving not currently locked away somewhere, I might believe this to be an act of vengeance aimed solely at us,” he said. “But as it stands, if you are correct, I’m more inclined to think this is only phase one of a new plan to destabilize the Alpha Quadrant.”  
  
“It would be in keeping with their previous attempts at subtle manipulation prior to falling back on brute force. Tugging at old wounds that haven’t yet healed,” Bashir said.  
  
“They are quite skilled at that.”  
  
Tastha rolled her eyes. “This is a fine theory, but where does it leave us? Headed for the Gamma Quadrant?” She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and shuddered. “In that case, you can leave me here.”  
  
Both Bashir and Damar froze; it was clear neither of them had thought that far ahead. Damar knew he certainly hadn’t. “They could be anywhere in Dominion territory,” he said. “Finding them would be next to impossible, even with the _Defiant_.”  
  
Bashir shook his head. “They couldn’t be in the Gamma Quadrant. Right now the only vessels permitted passage through the wormhole are trade ships. And each of those must be approved and its contents catalogued. They’re rigorously screened throughout process, and their ships are subject to search coming and going. We’d certainly scan for cloaked ships if the wormhole opened by itself, and a thorough sensor sweep is done whenever a ship passes through. Even traveling at impulse, we would have seen _something_ to indicate the presence of a cloaked warship.”  
  
“It could have come through with one of the first Dominion convoys, when they were fortifying themselves in our territory,” Damar suggested. “One anomalous sensor reading among dozens of ships wouldn’t be enough to raise an alarm.”  
  
The doctor hummed in agreement. “And I believe at the time we had rather more pressing concerns.”  
  
“But _you_ were allies with the Dominion during the war,” Tastha said to Damar, “surely they would have told you about the existence of such a vessel?”  
  
Damar shook his head. “Weyoun never trusted me, and I am more than certain the Founder felt the same. For that matter, I doubt they even trusted Dukat, and he was the one they had initially chosen to place at the head of the government.” Dukat certainly wanted to believe they did, at any rate. “No, they wouldn’t have shared something like that with either of us, and certainly not me. I imagine if the ship was brought to the Alpha Quadrant, it was for a specific purpose. One we were not privy to.”  
  
“It was possible the ship was meant to serve as an alternate means of escape, should the war turn against them. Their priority would have been the safety of any Founders on this side of the wormhole,” Bashir said.  
  
There was something about their casual speculation that still bothered Damar. Seizing upon a brief lull in the conversation he asked, “What about Odo?”  
  
Bashir hesitated and frowned at the floor. “I’ll admit, he did cross my mind,” he said finally. “But I cannot believe that Odo would allow any of this, much less participate.”  
  
The implications of that statement were clear enough that neither had to mention them, and they both kept further speculation to themselves for what Damar imagined were completely different reasons.

The room grew uncomfortably quiet following the change in subject, and in the midst of the pall that had settled over them, Tastha made a show of sighing deeply as she slapped her hands down on her bony knees. “Well then, if we’re certain they’re not in the Gamma Quadrant, where could they be?”  
  
“Anywhere,” Bashir answered with a shrug. He had one hand at his chin, tapping his thumb against his lower lip, and the other propped up on his hip as he wandered the cargo bay in circles. “Wherever one might hide a ship that shouldn’t exist.”  
  
“…What about the Orias system?” Damar asked.  
  
Bashir cocked his head. It reminded Damar of a hound that had encountered an unfamiliar noise for the first time. “It makes sense," he said. "The Obsidian Order used the relative isolation of the Orias system to conceal their activities from the Cardassian government. With the Order’s downfall, no one would believe anyone was foolish enough to try the same thing twice. And you hardly have the resources to spare scanning empty systems for potential threats. What better spot to hide than in the last place anyone would think to look?”  
  
Suddenly Tastha jumped up from her seat with such ease that both Damar and Bashir were momentarily taken aback. “In that case,” she said, hefting her shawls around her, “when do we leave?”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
A week aboard the _Defiant_ with both Damar and Tastha was not at all how Julian had envisioned his part in their grand rescue mission. Something about everyone casually going about their business while the ship prowled through Cardassian space under cloak seemed rather… unheroic. The only part of their journey that was at all out of the ordinary was Nog’s occasional list of complaints related to Damar, although that was becoming more and more commonplace by the day. Julian had really expected that it would be Tastha who caused the most strife, given her propensity for strong-arming everyone around her, but she had been relatively relaxed the entire mission thus far. Even Damar seemed strangely at ease around her.  
  
The whole thing was, on the whole, quite mundane. Which he supposed actually made it remarkable, in the end.  
  
They were approaching the end of the eighth day, and rapidly closing in on the Orias system, when Julian summoned Damar to the bridge. An act punctuated by a long-suffering sigh from Nog at the navigation console.  
  
Julian turned his chair to watch Damar as he entered. He seemed in decent spirits, which Julian attributed to the relative ease of their journey. Or perhaps it was his unencumbered access to the ship; it seemed pointless to have him escorted by security while they were underway. He wondered if perhaps it was the first time since his arrival at the Bajoran hospital that Damar had been allowed to go anywhere or do anything without someone watching his every move.  
  
“We’re less than an hour out from the Orias system,” he informed Damar, who had come over to stand beside his chair. “I thought you might like to be on the bridge when we arrived.”  
  
“I certainly won’t fight to stay in my cabin. It makes my quarters on the station look cavernous by comparison.”  
  
“Not much room for comfort on a ship like this, I’m afraid.” Julian smiled and swiveled his chair back toward the main screen. “Lieutenant, begin scanning for cloaked ships when we’re within sensor range.”  
  
“Aye, sir,” Nog answered.  
  
“One cloaked ship in an otherwise empty system,” Damar said. “And they’ve had weeks to prepare for this exact situation.”  
  
“Yes, but we have the element of surprise,” Julian reminded him. “I’d gladly trade that for the home-field advantage.”  
  
“Surprise won’t help us much if they begin executing prisoners the minute we decloak.”  
  
Julian refrained from mentioning that he had considered the possibility of that happening, and that his plan to deal with it amounted to little more than simply hoping they didn’t. “We’ll have to be fast,” was all he said.  
  
“Sir, sensors have detected an uncloaked _Keldon_ -class vessel in orbit of Orias III,” Nog reported. “It’s in visual range.”  
  
“On screen.”  
  
The _Keldon_ appeared on the viewscreen before them, accompanied by the backdrop of the desolate planet below. Nog shook his head at the image. “Sensors aren’t showing any life signs aboard,” he said.  
  
“Is there anything on the planet?”  
  
That produced the familiar and comforting sound of a positive result from the computer. “They’re down there. I’m picking up thirty-four Bajoran life signs on the surface.”  
  
Damar marched over to Nog’s console and peered down at the sensor readings. “Only thirty-four?”  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” Nog hissed angrily. “I know how to count. Now please move away from my station.”  
  
There should have been thirty- _five_ crewmen on the surface. Julian could more than understand Damar’s agitation; if there was any cause to have singled someone out, it stood to reason it would be Kira. She had commanded the mission, and she was the highest ranking among the missing personnel. Add to that her relationship with Damar, and it made the single absence rather alarming. “Have them beamed aboard, and inform Doctor Tastha—”  
  
“Sir,” Ensign Alard interrupted from the back of the bridge, “I’m picking up some kind of localized dampening field in that area. We won’t be able to establish a transporter lock.”  
  
“I suppose that means we’ll have to go down there ourselves.” Julian looked up at Damar. “Are you at all familiar with this planet?”  
  
Damar shook his head. “No, but I’m still coming with you,” he said.  
  
“I had a feeling you would say that. Ensign,” Julian addressed to Alard, “and Lieutenant,” he said to Nog, “you’re with us.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The surface of Orias III was much as Damar had expected it to be; arid, devoid of vegetation or any signs of wildlife, and warm. He felt quite comfortable, but from the way Bashir and the others began tugging at their collars almost immediately, it seemed he was alone in his ease. He felt mild sympathy for the other two, but it brought him great pleasure to watch the Ferengi slowly bake under the relentless sun.  
  
“There’s a cave system about 200 meters that way, beneath that outcropping,” Alard said. He used his tricorder to point toward a rocky cliff face on the other side of a small gulch beside them. “The life signs are coming from there.”  
  
“Why would someone set up a dampening field that allowed us to _scan_ for life signs, but not transport anyone from the surface?” Nog asked. He had picked up a phaser rifle from a weapons locker on their way to the transporter room, and now he hefted it a little higher, as though he suddenly feared a surprise attack. “It doesn’t make any sense.”  
  
“Perhaps whoever brought them here wanted to be able to check up on them without coming down to the surface,” Bashir suggested.

“Or maybe it's a trap.”

“I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility. But whatever the reason, I'm sure we’ll have answers soon enough,” Bashir said. He glanced at Damar and added, “All the answers.”  
  
Damar wanted to believe that was true, but experience had taught him that optimism was often the precursor to disappointment. He wasn’t sure he could take another blow when the stakes were so high already.  
  
“I’ll just be happy to get out of the sun,” Alard muttered.  
  
Bashir glanced at his own tricorder again. “You might be glad of the warmth once we’re in there. From these readings it look as though the tunnels descend some twenty meters below the surface.”  
  
Alard pointed to a break in the rock face. “The good news is we can access the caves through that opening. The bad news is that the mineral composition of the rock means our tricorders won't be able to do much more than point us in the right direction once we're inside.”

Bashir seemed unconcerned by the news. “That will have to do,” he said.  
  
“It looks like someone cut this out of the rock,” Nog observed as they made their approach.  
  
Bashir nodded and reached out to run a hand along the smooth edges of the cave mouth. “That’s exactly what they did. Keep your weapons ready, but don’t fire unless it’s absolutely necessary. The last thing we need is to hit one of the captives or cause a cave in.”  
  
Damar started to agree with the others, until he realized that he wasn’t armed. “I don’t have a weapon.”  
  
“Right… I did consider giving you one, but—”  
  
“But an armed Cardassian coming upon a group of Bajorans might cause more problems than it solves.”  
  
“I see you understand my hesitation. It’s nothing personal.”  
  
It certainly _felt_ personal. But Damar did understand the doctor’s reasoning, and he accepted it with as much decorum as he could muster under the circumstances—despite how the Ferengi’s smirk grated on his nerves.  
  
“We’ll split into two teams,” Bashir continued. He was standing just inside the entrance to the cave, which almost immediately branched off into several other tunnels of different sizes. “Alard and Damar, Nog and myself. We should be able to communicate with one another while we’re in here, but just to be safe, stay together, and keep a close eye on where you’ve been.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an extra combadge. “Here,” he said, offering it to Damar. “Just in case.”  
  
Damar took the badge and pinned it to his jacket. For a few seconds while the others prepared to set out, he considered taking it off and attaching it to his wrist, where he was accustomed to carrying a communication device. But he convinced himself that he would be able to remember if the situation called for it. It was just his nerves, he decided. He was setting himself up to fail by second-guessing his ability to respond in a potential emergency. He put the thought firmly from his mind and focused on the chatter between Bashir and the others.  
  
Alard pointed to the leftmost tunnel and the tunnel directly in front of them. “These two are probably our best bet. The others look like they end only a few hundred meters in.”  
  
Bashir turned on the light attached to his wrist, and Alard did likewise. Nog reached for the small panel on the side of his rifle and turned on a light that shone brighter than the other two combined. For a moment before they separated the entrance to the cave was bathed in artificial light. “Alright, gentlemen. Good luck,” Bashir said. He headed off into the leftmost tunnel, followed by Nog. Alard set off for the tunnel ahead of them with Damar close behind.  
  
They had only been walking for a few minutes when Damar started to doubt the wisdom of their plan to separate. “Keep an eye out for traps,” he warned the ensign.  
  
Alard turned around and pointed his light directly at Damar’s face, then apologized and aimed it at the ground, instead. “We didn’t detect any explosives or automated weaponry on our scans,” he said.  
  
Damar frowned. What sort of safety procedures did they teach in Starfleet? “There are plenty of ways to kill someone that don’t show up on scanners.” Methods he’d seen the Dominion employ numerous times, with brutally efficient results. If Bashir was right, and they were facing a plot devised by Dominion forces, there was no telling what could be waiting for them up ahead.  
  
Alard was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded and said, “I’ll keep that in mind. The life signs are in this direction.” He lifted his light again and use it to point to a second tunnel that branched off towards the left.  
  
Damar kept on Alard’s heels as they made their way deeper underground. The temperature had already dropped considerably, and every so often a gust of colder air would greet them as they turned a corner and continued down. Somewhere there was another entrance to the cave, and likely running water, too. “The air feels damp,” he said after a while. “It must be miserable to be trapped down here.” His imagination kept trying to trick him into believing that he could smell whatever scent Kira wore, but he knew that it wasn’t really there; he was simply inventing reasons to be hopeful. Someone was missing, and it could only be her. No one else could incite anger like Kira, and no one else would refuse to be contained peaceably like her, either.  
  
_“Bashir to Alard and Damar.”_  
  
“Alard here.”  
  
_“We’ve located what we believe to be the generator for the dampening field. We’re going to attempt to shut it down. Stand by.”_  
  
They waited as instructed, and in the stillness the cold and clammy air felt even more uncomfortable. It seemed to move straight through Damar's jacket, chilling his skin and sticking to him like cheap kanar. He wanted to be anywhere else. Even the cramped closet back on the station would have been preferable. “How long does it take to—”  
  
_“It’s offline,”_ Bashir informed them. Another short silence passed before he spoke again. _“It seems whatever we just disabled wasn’t generating the dampening field, after all. We’ll have to keep searching on foot.”_  
  
“Understood, Alard out.” He inclined his head in the direction they had been heading before, and Damar dutifully followed. “I wonder what that thing was,” he asked as they walked.  
  
“It could have been left behind by the Order. I imagine most of their equipment remained here after the fleet was destroyed.”  
  
“Wouldn’t someone have salvaged it?”  
  
Damar chuckled to himself. No one was going to lay a hand on Obsidian Order technology unless they knew for sure that it wouldn’t kill them in the process. And since it was the Order, there simply was no way to know for sure. He was about to explain that to the ensign when there was a loud snap and a flash of silver just barely visible in the darkness. Alard went down before Damar realized anything had happened. He fell on his back, writhing and gurgling wetly as he clawed at his own throat and the light on his wrist flashed around the tunnel.  
  
Damar hurried to Alard’s side and pulled down his collar to find that his neck had been pierced by some sort of projectile. Blood was soaking through the gold fabric and pooling in the hollow of his throat. It was impossible to tell if the object had exited or if it was still inside the wound, and Alard’s desperate flailing wasn’t helping matters. “You’ll be fine,” Damar said, trying his best to calm the ensign, who was thrashing in the dirt as he struggled to breathe. Damar reached under his jacket and tore part of his shirt to create a makeshift bandage. He pressed it to Alard’s throat and waited to see if it helped before he reached with his other hand and tapped his wrist. Then he cursed at himself and tapped the combadge on his chest. “Bashir!” he nearly shouted. He didn’t bother to wait for acknowledgment. ”Alard’s been injured. There was…” He looked up at the wall of the tunnel near where the ensign had been standing. A thin length of wire hung from a piece of metal embedded in the rock. “There was a tripwire.” A nasty one, too. Crude, but effective enough.  
  
Next to him Alard was still making noises that sent chills up Damar’s spine, but he seemed to be breathing more easily, and the blood hadn’t yet soaked through the dressing Damar held against his neck. It certainly wasn’t good, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.  
  
_“We’re on our way to your location,”_ Bashir answered. _“Try to keep him stable.”_  
  
Damar laughed helplessly. “I’ll try,” he said. “You might want to hurry.”  
  
The phaser Alard had been carrying was lying on the ground nearby, half buried in the loose soil. It was close enough that Damar was sure he could reach it without taking pressure off the wound. The trap could have been there for years, or it might have been placed since the Bajorans’ arrival. There was no way to know, and Damar was uncomfortable facing that lack of certainty unarmed. He stretched out his free hand, keeping one eye on Alard’s injury as he blindly groped for the weapon. Just as his fingers closed around the grip he felt a split-second of hard, heavy pain hitting him like a wall slamming down on the back of his head, and then everything went black.  
  
  
  
  
Damar woke some time later to the steady hum of a ship’s engines and the rhythmic sounds of monitoring equipment. He opened his eyes to find he was in the _Defiant’s_ sickbay.  
  
“Don’t you ever get tired of lying in biobeds?” Bashir asked him. There was a tone of all-too-familiar amusement in his question.  
  
Damar turned his head to find the doctor standing beside him. “Don’t you ever get tired of giving me grief?” he asked. He tried to lift his head, only to be assaulted by an intense pain that felt like something clawing at the inside of his skull. “What happened?” he asked, wincing. Then he remembered Ensign Alard. “Where is—”  
  
“Right here,” Bashir said. He stepped aside to give Damar an unobstructed view of the next bed over. “The projectile pierced his—”  
  
“Please,” Damar winced. He’d already seen enough, there was no need for a graphic clinical analysis.  
  
“Very well. I’ve treated his injury, and with a little rest and he’ll be good as new. As for you…” Bashir reached for a hypospray on the tray next to the bed and pressed it to the soft part of Damar’s neck. “That should help with the headache.”  
  
“What happened to me?”  
  
“The equipment we found wasn’t generating the dampening field, obviously, but it seems it _was_ powering a forcefield that had been set up to keep the Bajoran prisoners contained. They were finally able to escape when we shut it down. During the rush to freedom one of them came across you leaning over an injured Starfleet officer, and apparently assumed the worst.”  
  
“I was hit with a rock, wasn’t I,” Damar said, his voice flat.  
  
“I’m afraid so.”  
  
The indignity of it was almost worse than the actual pain, which, fortunately for him, was finally beginning to fade. “Kira?”  
  
Bashir shook his head. “She wasn’t with them. But I think we both already knew that before we went down there.”  
  
So, it was exactly as they had feared. The only small comfort was that he wouldn’t have to explain to Kira how he had managed to get himself knocked unconscious during her rescue. “Have you asked the others if they know where she was taken?”  
  
“I haven’t spoken to any of them yet. I thought you’d probably insist on coming with me when I did,” Bashir said. He noted something on a padd and set it down next to the hypospray. “When you’re feeling up to it, we can have that conversation.”  
  
Damar nodded and squeezed his eyes shut as the last of the pain fought valiantly to keep its grip on his skull. “I thought I was done feeling like this.”  
  
“What do you mean? Have you experienced these symptoms _before_ being bludgeoned with a rock?”  
  
He waved away the question with an annoyed flick. “It’s nothing.”  
  
“Well, if you won’t answer me, I can always ask Doctor Tastha to come in here and—”  
  
“I had a few dizzy spells, but I’m fine now.”  
  
He was immediately faced with a tricorder as Bashir scanned him from head to toe. “You’re still in recovery from when you were poisoned, Damar. You should have told me about this.”  
  
“It's been  _months_. I didn’t see a need,” Damar objected weakly. It was immediately followed by a wave of nausea that seemed just as likely to have come from the headache as whatever was in the hypospray.  
  
“Well, fortunately for the two of us, you’re _not_ a doctor. I’m not seeing anything out of the ordinary, but if you experience anything like this again in the future—provided it isn’t following blunt-force trauma—you’re to inform me,” Bashir ordered. “Understood?” He closed the tricorder and waited for an answer.  
  
Damar finally gave in and agreed, if only to save himself the trouble of being hounded into capitulation. Satisfied, Bashir stepped away to do some work at a nearby console, and Damar took the opportunity to test sitting upright. The throbbing pain had finally relented, but in its place it left both the nausea and sharp sting in the back of his head that he assumed was probably the point of impact. “Did you treat this?” he asked, gingerly tapping around the most painful spot.  
  
“I did, but you’ll have some lingering discomfort for a few hours. I can only do so much when someone slams a small boulder into the back of your skull.”  
  
Kira would have told him to shrug it off, he was certain. She might have even found the whole scenario rather amusing. He made a note to tell her about it once they found her, assuming they ever did. Somehow he felt as though he had known even before they left the station that she wouldn't be there. That he would have to do much more than hope for the best to get her back.  
  
“Chin up,” Bashir said from the other side of the room. “It’ll get better soon.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
Once he felt sure that Damar would be able to stand without getting ill, Julian finally cleared him to leave Sickbay. Together they made their way to the _Defiant’s_ mess hall, where he had ordered Nog to gather the rescued Bajorans after they were checked for injuries. It seemed like a decent place to let them settle in after their ordeal, in addition to being the only space that would fit them all at once apart from one of the bays.  
  
“Do you think it’s wise to let them know who I am?” Damar asked as they turned the last corner.  
  
Julian shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll be able to conceal it forever, which is assuming none of them know you by sight already. And we’ve played our strongest hand undertaking this rescue mission. At this point, I think it’s best if we make your part in the matter as widespread as possible, don’t you?”  
  
“It’s an odd time to be concerned with my public image, Doctor,” Damar said quietly.  
  
“On the contrary. I think it’s the perfect time.” Julian opened the door to the mess hall and watched as thirty-four heads turned in near unison, and several sets of eyes narrowed at the sight of the Cardassian standing beside him. “Hello again,” he said. “I hope you’re all feeling better now that you’ve had some time to relax and get your bearings.”  
  
“We’re off that rock,” one of the older crewmen said. Julian had identified him as Major Oln Teram, the commander of the _Velerna_. Kira’s absence made him the highest ranking among the Bajoran personnel. He pointed to Damar. “Who’s this?”  
  
“This is Legate Damar, leader of the Cardassian Union. He helped us find you. In fact, it was because of him that we even knew to look for you.” Julian caught Damar’s uncomfortable frown from the corner of his eye, but it couldn’t be helped; selling his role in the mission would only benefit them all down the road. It was the truth, anyway. “Everyone else believed you were dead,” he added.  
  
“ _Dead?_ ” someone gasped from the back of the room.  
  
“I’m afraid so.” While he thought of a way to explain what had happened, Julian noticed Damar’s gaze flicker from face to face, searching for something. Was he suspicious of the Bajorans? While it _was_ possible that someone had sabotaged the mission from the inside, or provided the information to do so, it was hard to imagine any saboteur willingly exiling themselves to a desolate planet. He cleared his throat and continued. “It’s a long story, one I’ll have more than enough time to explain on our way back. But right now I need to ask if any of you know what happened to Colonel Kira.”  
  
A few of the Bajorans muttered quietly to each other, and some glanced about the room nervously. It was Oln who spoke up again; “She was taken, maybe a week ago. We don’t know where, and we haven’t seen her since.”  
  
“Did you see who took her?” As much as he dreaded the thought, and what being right could mean for them all, Julian was still certain that it had to be the Dominion who was behind the abductions—as well as the attempts on Damar’s life.  
  
“We never saw anyone. They just beamed her out one morning without even lowering the forcefield. We were taken from our ships the same way, right through the shields,” Oln said. “When we materialized in the cave we found enough food and water to keep us alive for about two months.”  
  
Some of the others joined in with their own versions of what they had seen and experienced, and Julian carefully listened and picked out what seemed to be the most relevant details. When they were done he smiled and thanked them all. “Your assistance has been invaluable,” he said. “I’ll send Lieutenant Nog in here shortly to show you all to your quarters.”  
  
When they left the mess hall Damar seemed to visibly relax, as though he had been holding his breath since they walked through the door. “Is everything alright?” Julian asked.  
  
“It will be if I never have to face that many furious Bajorans ever again.”  
  
“I don’t think they were _all_ furious.”  
  
“You’re right,” Damar said, “that girl in the front only looked guilty. I assume she’s the one who attacked me.”  
  
They entered the turbolift together, and Julian instructed it to take them to the bridge. He was relieved that it was only annoyance, and not suspicion that had been behind Damar’s stare. “Oh, don’t be too hard on her, I’m sure she feels terrible about it.”  
  
“As well she should. Ensign Alard could have died because of her.”  
  
It shouldn’t have surprised Julian that Damar’s anger was directed at the Bajoran girl for someone else’s sake, and not his own. He was briefly ashamed that it did. He had to remind himself to give Damar a little more credit than that—after all, there had clearly been _something_ about him compelling enough to make Kira overlook her own feelings about Cardassians, to say nothing of their own history together. It certainly wasn't his winning personality that had charmed her. “Well, you’ll have a week to learn to live with one another. Unless you intend to remain in your cabin the whole time,” he said.  
  
“Don’t be surprised if I do,” Damar said. “I’ve become very adept at making myself comfortable in small spaces.”  
  
The gallows humor felt forced, at best, but Julian didn’t draw attention to it. He understood too well how disappointing their mission must have been for Damar, regardless of its relative success. He had done his duty as Cardassia’s leader, but not to himself. Not yet.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
After a hellish week aboard the _Defiant_ , Damar would have kissed the ground of a Breen prison ship if it had offered him escape. Their return to the station was greeted by a crowd of people who had heard news of the rescue in advance of their arrival. Due mostly to Bashir’s efforts to publicize Damar’s role in the mission, he assumed. It seemed oddly hollow to him as he watched everyone gather around and embrace the returning Bajorans. No one seemed to mind that one of them hadn’t come back with the others. Of course he understood that these were friends and loved ones; people they knew intimately whom they had believed lost forever. He didn’t begrudge them their joy. He simply couldn’t share in it. Not until Kira was found.  
  
Bashir eventually joined him on the outskirts of the crowd, which seemed oblivious to the surly Cardassian looming nearby. He crossed his arms and smiled as he observed the spontaneous celebration. “This is much better than the alternative,” he said. Damar could barely hear him over all the commotion.  
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“Well, I had been asked to identify remains from the wreckage. I’d much rather bring someone home alive.”  
  
“I suppose I would too,” Damar said. He felt selfish for his jealousy, and angry at himself for failing to find Kira. It was almost worse than thinking she was dead. She could be anywhere, in any condition. He had nothing now; no leads, no hope.  
  
“Come on,” Bashir said, tapping him on the arm. He seemed determined to keep Damar busy. “We’ll join Tastha in the cargo bay.”  
  
Damar didn’t bother to question what she could possibly be up to in there, or why it required his presence. He felt drained by circumstances he couldn’t control. It was easy enough to let Bashir lead him around for the time being. They left the cheering crowd and made their way down the arc of the Docking Ring, around to where Tastha was waiting for them in Cargo Bay 4. When they entered she was hunched over a piece of wreckage, slowly scanning its surface.  
  
Damar looked down at her. “Why are you still doing that?”  
  
“Because there may yet be answers in this metal,” she said.  
  
“There are no answers,” Damar muttered. He left Bashir’s side and started wandering the rows of debris, pointlessly trying to identify which pieces belonged to which ships.  
  
From the corner of his eye watched the two of them converse quietly as he slowly made his way up one row and back down another. In the midst of slipping into the comforting arms of self pity and listening to their chatter evolve from disagreement to debate, Damar caught a steady sound slipping through the noise. “What is that?” he asked.  
  
Tastha and Bashir stopped, and both looked down at the tricorder in Tastha’s hand.  
  
“But… we found everyone,” Bashir said, perplexed.  
  
Damar didn’t understand. No one had briefed him on the details of the investigation, nor the specifications of the equipment they were using. “What does that mean?” he demanded. Stepping over a row of debris he made his way over, and the tricorder increased its excited alarm to match his approach. “Why is it doing that?”  
  
“It’s programmed to search for remains, but there shouldn’t be anything here, and certainly not anywhere on you,” Bashir explained.  
  
Tastha shuffled up to Damar and began a slow, thorough scan of his person to determine exactly what was causing the tricorder to believe _he_ was its intended target. She finally came to a stop at the cuff of his sleeve, where a patch of dried blood sent the equipment into another frenzy. “It’s this,” she said. “When did it happen?”  
  
“That must be Ensign Alard’s blood,” Bashir said. “From when he was injured by the tripwire. But that doesn’t make any sense, these tricorders are only meant to indicate when they’ve sensed _Bajoran_ biosigns. I’ve had one pointed at me half a dozen times since we started our investigation, they’ve never gone off before now.”  
  
“That’s because it’s _not_ Alard’s blood,” Damar said darkly. He cursed himself and his shortsighted idealism. He didn’t know exactly what it meant, or why it was happening, but he suddenly understood that he had been a fool, and now he was paying the price for his carelessness. “It’s Nelara’s.”


	5. Chapter 5

“I don’t understand,” Bashir said, “Nelara is a Cardassian.”  
  
“It would seem she isn’t,” Damar responded bitterly. He wondered at what point he had become so blinded by his desire to prove himself to his people and to the Alpha Quadrant that he had failed to notice his own assistant wasn’t who she claimed to be. She wasn’t even _what_ she claimed to be.  
  
Tastha cleared her throat and held up the tricorder with the display pointed toward them. “You’re both right,” she said, frowning. “She’s half-Bajoran. My guess is she’s been surgically altered. And quite convincingly, too, since both of you believed she was a full-blooded Cardassian.”  
  
If possible, Bashir seemed even more distraught by the results of the scan than Damar. “But why? What possible reason could she have to hide her true identity?”  
  
“Half-breed children aren’t exactly welcomed in our society,” Damar reminded him. Although he had once hoped to change that before he realized that he would practically have to rebuild the entire Union from the ground up, first. For all the wrong reasons, his ‘laughable’ idealism didn’t seem so laughable anymore.  
  
“Nor ours, unfortunately,” Tastha said with a resigned sigh.  
  
“Do you think that could be the real reason? Perhaps this is simply happenstance,” Bashir suggested.  
  
As much as he wanted to believe that was the case, Damar simply couldn’t trust in such an enormous coincidence. He started pacing the cargo bay, going over the times Nelara had seemed too distant, too quiet for his comfort; where had she been, all those nights when they couldn’t find her right away? He always assumed she was off seeing to her own business, but perhaps there was more to it. He shook his head. “No, she’s involved in this,” he said.  
  
“How can you be so sure?”  
  
“Because nothing else makes sense!” Damar snapped. He had stomped over to the far end of the room, and his voice echoed through the nearly empty cargo bay.  
  
“That’s hardly an airtight justification for accusing her of sabotage.”  
  
To Damar’s great shock, it was Tastha who spoke up in his defense; “It _is_ difficult to imagine that she just happened to find her way into his employ as these events began to unfold,” she said.  
  
“But Damar was poisoned before anyone even knew he was still alive, or where he was. She couldn’t possibly have had a hand in that!”  
  
“No, but there is no reason to believe she’s acting alone, either,” Damar said. “She was on Cardassia with me when the Bajoran ships were attacked. She’s obviously conspiring with someone else, the question is who.” He kicked aside a piece of debris that had become separated from the others as he made his way back up the row toward Bashir and Tastha.  
  
What struck him as the most distressing detail to come of this new information was that his enemies had apparently gambled a great deal on the mission even Nelara hadn’t known was happening until the day of their departure. It was difficult to accept that such an effective and politically devastating plan apparently relied on the hope that none of the Bajoran vessels were able to outmaneuver their own vessel. There was no way to know how the Bajoran Militia may have outfitted their ships, or who else might be among the crew—  
  
Unless someone had been aboard to perform reconnaissance.  
  
“Nelara toured the Bajoran ships with Starfleet Security before we left for Cardassia,” he said, now convinced that she was involved in the abductions. “She knew exactly what their armaments were, and which ship Kira was on. She knew how many personnel were aboard each vessel. She could have planted a device to disable the Bajoran shields, or even cripple their systems from within.”  
  
“That _is_ a bit more than coincidence could account for,” Bashir admitted. “Although it does rather soundly debunk my Dominion theory, as well.”  
  
“Not necessarily. Right now all we know is that Nelara is involved, not who she’s working with, or why." Why would a half-Cardassian agree to a plan that would put Cardassia in danger? Why use innocent people to achieve their goals? Was it because the other assassination attempts had failed? "What concerns me," he continued, "is that it’s clear they chose this target because of Kira, at least in part. But why? Everything we have seen so far suggests that this enemy is well prepared, determined, and more than willing to wait for the right opportunity. If they knew how to get to me, then they would also have to know that I would never break under such pressure.” Apart from the brief period he had given in and done just that, anyhow. “Eventually I would fight back, if only out of anger.”  
  
“ _Because_ of your relationship,” Bashir said. “I had already theorized that part of this was intended to not only undermine your position as leader of Cardassia, but your potential threat as a martyr, as well. Consider the coup it would be for your enemies if you acted exactly as they might have hoped, and lashed out in revenge over Kira’s death.” He shook his head. “I imagine that the political fallout with Bajor was merely an added bonus. Any attempt at forcibly bringing about a regime shift would require first diminishing your popularity in the eyes of your people. Rather significantly, at that. What better way to achieve that goal than by exposing your relationship with a Bajoran?”  
  
“The backlash from Bajor would only worsen,” Tastha added. “Your romance with her would be seen as an echo of the repugnant practices of the Occupation. Regardless of how sincere your feelings are.”  
  
Damar thought of the passionate encounter he and Kira had shared aboard the _Ranat_ ; the one Nelara had interrupted. He despised the thought of anyone casting judgment on their feelings for one another, but he could easily imagine that everything Tastha and Bashir had said was true. What a fool he’d been, thinking he could trust anyone who walked through his door. He should have learned that lesson with Kren.  
  
_Kren_.  
  
He had practically _insisted_ that Kira was going to be targeted. A “premonition,” he'd called it. Damar cursed under his breath. “I have to contact Central Command. Or speak to someone on the Civil Council,” he said. “I can't just remain here, doing nothing!”  
  
Bashir shook his head. “We can’t afford to be rash about this, Damar. Nelara has no idea that we're on to her, but if we show our hand—”  
  
“I don’t need you to point out the obvious!” Damar snapped. But that was a lie; his thoughts of a swift return to Cardassia Prime extended no further than simply going there. He had all but handed Nelara the Cardassian Union, and left without so much as a backward glance. For all he knew she could have declared him dead. Again. With Kren at her side, the fragile government that had taken so long to find its footing could potentially be toppled with minimal effort. Struggling to keep his composure, and to hide the shame that pulled at him like weights strapped to his limbs, he said, “I think Kren may also be involved in this. The night I dismissed him he warned me that Kira would suffer for my mistakes. At the time I thought it was just bitter ranting.”  
  
“Why didn’t you mention this before?” Bashir demanded.  
  
Because the swift and devastating reprisal Damar had already earned from tempting fate had been humiliating. Because it had nearly destroyed him to believe his foolish desires cost Kira her life, and he didn’t _want_ to think about it. “I didn’t remember until just now,” he lied.  
  
Tastha cast him a sidelong glance, but Damar pretended not to notice it. “This is all well and good,” she said, “but it still leaves us here, without a plan.”  
  
“Kren was Damar's right hand. His involvement could significantly change matters. We’ll return to Cardassia, and apprehend Nelara and Kren. Under the circumstances I believe the sooner we do it, the better,” Bashir said.  
  
“But what if Colonel Kira isn’t _on_ Cardassia Prime? And if she is, how will you know where? It’s a big planet, and there is no way to be certain that either of them will talk. Arresting them could be what costs the colonel her life.”  
  
“They’ll talk,” Damar said. “If it’s one thing my people are good at, it’s getting answers.” Kren had never used the typical interrogation methods on the saboteurs in his custody, ostensibly because he’d been ordered not to. Now Damar couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t because that only offered him an opportunity to claim they never revealed anything under questioning.  
  
“You’re referring to torture?” Bashir asked. Damar could hear the disgust in his voice. “I won’t be party to that. And I highly doubt that the Federation will continue to support your administration if you turn your back on your own principles whenever doing so suits your needs.”  
  
“Do you want Kira back or not?”  
  
“Not that way. And if you intend to return to Cardassia aboard the _Defiant_ , you won’t suggest it again.”  
  
Damar growled and shoved an empty crate aside with his foot. He was about to argue against Bashir’s delicate human sensibilities, but he caught Tastha’s glare from the corner of his eye and stopped. “What?” he demanded.  
  
“You must not care for her very much,” she said matter-of-factly.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“If you think she would approve of a rescue conducted on the basis of torture. What do you think she would say? Don’t you know her better than that?”  
  
In his anger, Damar wanted to shout that he didn’t care whether she liked it or not, and in truth at least some small part of him actually didn’t; Kira had her way of doing things, and she certainly couldn’t claim that they had always been above board. But regardless of his impulse to point that out and continue arguing in favor of his more expedient methods, and as much as he was loath to admit it, deep down he knew that Tastha was right. Kira would never forgive him for resorting to torture just because it was easier, whether or not she had any grounds to object. Especially in light of learning that Nelara was a half-Bajoran. In truth, that particular detail did make the prospect of forcing answers out of them a great deal more unsettling than Damar had anticipated.  
  
When he turned back to Bashir, the doctor’s disapproving frown had become a stern gaze. “I take it we’ve settled the issue, then?” he asked. “Once we have the two of them in custody, we’ll be able to trace their movements and hopefully discern from that information where they’ve taken Kira.”  
  
“You hope,” Damar said.  
  
“There’s very little more we can do but hope, at this point. And unless I’m mistaken, this is the best idea we have.”  
  
“It’s the _only_ idea we have,” Tastha reminded them.  
  
  
  
  
Although Damar would have preferred to set out for Cardassia right away, Starfleet’s love of procedure delayed their departure while Bashir obtained the proper permissions to launch another foray into space that, at least in theory, Damar actually controlled. The entire exercise took an additional six hours, and by the time they had boarded the _Defiant_ for Cardassia Prime, Damar was close to climbing the walls in anticipation. Although the journey to his homeworld took no more than two days at a decent warp factor, it somehow felt twice as long as their expedition to the Orias system, despite both being undertaken for exactly the same purpose.  
  
He was pacing the cabin Bashir had assigned to him when he received word from the bridge that they were arriving in orbit of Cardassia.  
  
“I’ll be there shortly,” he responded.  
  
_“No need,”_ Bashir said. _“Meet me in the transporter room.”_  
  
Damar was already on his way out the door before the channel closed. The subdued lighting in the corridor suggested they were still cloaked, and he frowned at the darkness. He and the doctor—along with Constable Ilpal, who had joined them for the mission—had spent no less than four hours that afternoon debating the benefits drawbacks of waiting until they arrived to decloak. Damar had tried to explain to Bashir that, although they were _allies_ in the sense that the Cardassian people owed their continued freedom from Romulan and Klingon occupational forces to the efforts of the Federation, the _Defiant_ decloaking in orbit was likely to cause a minor panic. He likened it to waking up one morning to find your neighbor standing outside, holding a bat’leth with two disruptors strapped to the ends. The general populace might not be aware of the sudden appearance of a warship on their doorstep, but it would likely send the already beleaguered planetary defense forces into an uproar before they thought to send a hail and ask _why_ the ship was there.  
  
He had retired to his cabin for the remainder of the voyage, comfortable that Bashir understood that message. Clearly he had been wrong.  
  
When Damar arrived in the transporter room, he greeted Bashir with reproachful look that the doctor shrugged off easily. “We’ll re-engage the cloak immediately following transport,” Bashir said. He held out another combadge on loan, accompanied this time by a phaser.  
  
It wouldn’t matter, Damar wanted to explain. But then Bashir would have known that. “Are we to go alone?” he asked. He took both objects, noting that the phaser was already set to stun.  
  
“Lieutenant Nog and Constable Ilpal will be joining us shortly.”  
  
Almost as soon as he said that, the transporter room door opened, admitting the other two members of their landing party. Damar noted that Nog was absent his favorite rifle, and instead carried only a standard issue phaser strapped to his waist. Ilpal, however, had two Bajoran pistols on her hips. He couldn’t say for certain if that was normal for her or simply an intimidation tactic. Nor did he know which he preferred of the two. She joined them on the pad, and the space suddenly felt remarkably cramped.  
  
Bashir looked to the operator behind the console and said, “Relay the order to disengage the cloak, and begin transport.”  
  
The lights aboard the ship were only up for an instant before the beam was energized, and then they were standing on the grounds of his recently-claimed residence. The sudden assault of warm air was jarring, but pleasant. He took a moment to appreciate the feeling and then said to the others, “Security will know we’re here soon, if they don’t already. Expect them to—”  
  
“HALT,” someone shouted from nearby. A light from above zeroed in on the group, highlighting them in the darkness.  
  
“I’ll give Kren some credit, he trained your men well,” Bashir muttered as he slowly raised his hands.  
  
The rest of the party followed suit, apart from Damar, who turned to the source of the command and waited. He was already angered by the thought of breaking into his own home; the potential discovery that his entire staff had been involved in some plot to overthrow him would undoubtedly shift that feeling into outright rage. He wanted to be prepared when that happened.  
  
The guard finally appeared through the dark scrub brush that lined the path. He carried a disruptor rifle that he aimed squarely at the group as he made a cautious approach. “This is Trolet,” he spoke into the communicator strapped to his wrist. “I have apprehended four intruders in the garden, they—” He stopped short when he finally noticed Damar. “Legate Damar?” he asked incredulously. His rifle was instantly lowered and he stood straight, though still clearly bewildered. “But—”  
  
_“Trolet, are you there?”_ a voice on the other end of his comm asked. _“Did you say Legate Damar? What’s going on?”_  
  
Rather than bother with the usual confirmations and excuses, Damar went straight for the issue at hand: “Where is Nelara?” he demanded.  
  
“Sir? She’s… inside, I believe.” Trolet’s eyes darted between Bashir, Nog, and Ilpal, the last of whom he lingered on the longest. “May I ask—”  
  
“Gather anyone you think you can trust and find her. I want her in custody—unharmed. Do you understand?” It felt good to be the one giving orders, for a change. It felt even better when they were actually _obeyed_.  
  
Trolet seemed to abandon his apprehension with the sudden shift in purpose. “Understood, sir!” he nearly shouted. Without another word he took off back through the garden, and Damar could hear him relaying the command to the other guards who had been converging on their location.  
  
“That was easy,” Nog said.  
  
Bashir hummed in agreement. “It makes me wonder what might be in store for us up ahead.”  
  
It was Ilpal who seemed unconcerned with the potential repercussions. She pulled her pistols from their holsters and started making her way up the path toward the house. When the others didn’t immediately follow, she turned around and asked, “We’re going in, right?” Then she abruptly continued on her way before any of them even thought to answer.  
  
As it turned out, gaining access to the house itself was even easier than they had hoped; Trolet had clearly taken the order to gather his fellow guards and begin a search of the residence very seriously, and the party encountered no further resistance from security patrols as they made their way to the main staircase in the center of the house. If Nelara had been forewarned of their arrival, they saw no signs of it, nor did they come across any traps of the sort that had downed Ensign Alard. Damar took the stairs first, but reached no higher than the third step before he heard the sounds of phaser fire on the floor above. Without warning Ilpal rushed past, knocking him over, and bounded up the rest of the steps toward the commotion. Nog followed while Bashir helped Damar to his feet.  
  
“She enjoys her work,” Bashir explained apologetically.  
  
Damar only frowned and retrieved his weapon from where it had fallen. They followed the others up to the third floor, where they found Nog kneeling over the prone form of a Cardassian guard lying on the floor of the office, while Ilpal stood watch beside him. Damar came to a stop in the doorway. “Is he—”  
  
“He’s alive,” Nog said.  
  
Bashir hurried to the young man’s side and pulled out his tricorder. “He’s only been stunned. He’ll be alright.”  
  
“She’s armed,” Ilpal growled. She withdrew her weapons and swept across the room to take position in the doorway behind Damar.  
  
“She could have killed him,” Bashir said. “But she didn’t.”  
  
“Maybe she doesn’t want to kill anyone,” Nog suggested hopefully.  
  
Damar admired his optimism, but he hardly shared it. “Unless this is simply her way of telling us that she no longer cares if we know what she’s up to.” Regardless of whether she was a full-blooded Cardassian or not, Nelara certainly had the same unscrupulous leanings that would have made her an excellent candidate for the Order. “I wouldn’t be surprised if—”  
  
“ _Shhh_ ,” Nog suddenly hissed, cutting him short.  
  
“Excuse m—”  
  
“ _SHH!_ ”  
  
Ilpal turned from the doorway, and Bashir looked up from where he had taken up a vigil next to the unconscious guard. “What is it?” he asked.  
  
“I can hear someone.”  
  
Damar frowned. “Of course you can hear someone, there are guards all over the—”  
  
Ilpal shushed him and made a gesture to be quiet, and Damar spread his arms out in frustration. In his own home, on his own planet, in the empire _he commanded_ , he was being told to keep quiet so that a Ferengi could listen more intently to some stray noise he’d heard. “This is intolerable,” he said under his breath.  
  
Nog shushed him again, and Damar had to fight himself to keep his phaser down at his side.  
  
“Someone’s yelling,” he said after a short silence. “It’s a woman.”  
  
Bashir stood up. “Where?”  
  
“I can’t tell.” Nog shook his head and sighed. “There’s too much noise from the house.”  
  
Forgetting his earlier aggravation, Damar stepped closer. “What do you mean, _noise from the house?_ Is it the guards?”  
  
Again Nog shook his head. “It’s like… a low grinding. But it’s not regular, it stops and starts. Can’t you feel it?” he asked the rest of the group. “It’s got to be vibrating the whole house.”  
  
Damar was on the verge of dismissing Nog’s nonsense entirely when the sound of a discarded kanar bottle shifting against another drifted through the silence, and suddenly everything came together so neatly it was almost amusing how easily he had overlooked it. All the little inconveniences he had ignored, brushed aside as random and meaningless, they were all connected. To him, to the house. To everything that had happened. “They’re _below us_ ,” he said, and this time no one attempted to silence him.  
  
“He’s right,” Nog confirmed.  
  
“There must be some way to get down there. Perhaps if we can find it…” Bashir started to look around the room, tugging on furniture and poking around the objects on the walls.  
  
“I doubt she left it open for us to find,” Damar said, interrupting the doctor’s careful examination of the viewscreen.  
  
Nog crouched down and tilted his head toward the floor. With a frown, he said, “I bet we would be able to find another way in from the ground floor. I could probably hear them better from down there, too.” He started for the door, while Bashir made one last effort at finding a hidden release on the bookshelf.  
  
Ilpal moved aside and then followed them out as the party descended the stairs, heading for the bottom floor foyer. It was the largest space in the house, with a recessed area in the center upon which stood a small stand of decorative black branches. The three alternating staircases above curved around the space, forming an arc of dark metal that held the room like enfolding arms. There was, at least to Damar’s knowledge, no lower point in the house. Not even a cellar.  
  
Nog dropped down on his hands and knees and pressed his ample ear to the floor. No one spoke, and the house was utterly still as far as the rest of them could tell. “It’s definitely Colonel Kira,” he said finally.  
  
Something in Damar’s chest lurched uncomfortably, and he had to steady himself against the banister. In just a few short weeks he had gone from an ironclad determination to be with her, to believing she was dead, and then to only hoping she was still alive and he could find her in time. Now, knowing she was not only alive, but right below him, he suddenly felt more anxiety over her rescue than he had at any other time up to that point. She was right there, just out of reach. He was helpless to do anything for her.  
  
“If Nelara used a passageway to get down there, there should be some indication of its presence at the lowest level,” Bashir said. “We can scan for it.”  
  
Damar shook his head. “We scanned this building more times than I can count looking for traps, there was never any indication of anything but solid rock below the foundation. Whatever is down there, it’s shielded against scans.” Which wasn’t entirely surprising, but that brought him little comfort.  
  
“Cardassian precaution,” Bashir muttered. It wasn’t immediately apparent if he meant it as a compliment or a criticism, but Damar chose to ignore it. He didn’t expect outsiders to understand.  
  
Ilpal pointed her weapons at the ground. “What if we just blast through it?”  
  
Before Bashir could reach out to lower her pistols for her, Nog began shaking his head. “They’re too far down, you would burn out the power cell before you ever got to them.”  
  
“Not to mention risk bringing the entire floor down atop the very person we’re trying to rescue,” Bashir added. “Lieutenant, can you put that superior sense of hearing to use again, and locate some way to access the space below us?”  
  
Nog stood up and brushed the dust from his uniform. “I can try,” he said. He shot Damar a wary look. “But there are no guarantees. And it could take some time, this is a big house.”  
  
Damar could feel the wasted seconds crawling over his skin like insects. “Anything,” he urged. If whatever lay below them had more than one access point, which it most certainly did given its likely origins, then it was only a matter of time before Nelara carried out whatever had sent her down there. Assuming she didn’t simply flee with her prisoner altogether. If that happened, they might never find the two of them again. He couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t let Kira slip from his fingers one more time.  
  
Nog began his search, and while he painstakingly walked around the foyer, listening for anything out of the ordinary, the others convened by the front entrance and waited. No one dared to speak, and even breathing seemed too loud in the silence. Ilpal slowly holstered her weapons and crossed her arms, as if she couldn’t bear to stand idle and wait without physically restraining herself. Damar sympathized; he could breathe low and even, but he couldn’t stop his blood from pounding in his own ears.  
  
“There’s an empty space below here,” Nog called as he jogged back into the room from one of the adjoining chambers. He knocked on the lower wall below the staircase. “It might be part of a tunnel.”  
  
Ilpal was on it before the others had even fully processed the information. She pulled out her weapons and fired, blasting an enormous hole in the wall less than a meter from Nog, who threw himself back and landed sprawled across the floor. “Watch where you’re aiming!” he screeched.  
  
“I did. That’s why you weren’t hit.”  
  
“Do try not to kill anyone,” Bashir said on his way past her. “Please.”

Ilpal holstered her weapons and frowned while she watched Damar help Nog to his feet. "He's fine."  
  
An acrid, ancient smell wafted up from the hole, and everyone seemed to smell it at once. Bashir tried to turn away, and nearly doubled over when it failed to protect him from the stench. “I hope you’re wrong about this,” he said.  
  
Using his sleeve to cover his mouth and nose, Nog coughed a few times and gestured to one of his ears. “I wish I was. And it’s too late, anyway.”  
  
“ _Ugh!_ Why does it smell so _bad?_ ” Ilpal asked. She covered her nose and tried to breathe through her mouth, but the sour face she was making suggested that didn't work any better than turning away had.  
  
“I have a feeling this _isn’t_ part of the entrance Nelara’s been using,” Bashir said. “There’s no telling how long it’s been since this part of the structure was last accessed. All manner of bacteria and fungi have undoubtedly had ample time to—”  
  
“We can speculate on the unique environment of the passageway later,” Damar interrupted.  
  
“Right, we have a mission to complete.” Bashir tugged on the cuff of his sleeve as Nog had and held it to his face. He quickly glanced at the tunnel, then looked at the others. “Lieutenant,” he said, waving Nog toward the tunnel first.  
  
“But—”  
  
“I’ll go,” Damar volunteered. It was the least he could do in return for the use of the Ferengi’s ears. He withdrew his own weapon and held it ready as he walked toward the still-smoldering hole in the wall. Upon stepping over the makeshift threshold his eyes immediately began adjusting to the darkness, and he could make out a descending ladder that led to a set of roughly carved stairs. They almost perfectly mirrored the set above, only in reverse. “This way,” he said to the others, gesturing to his left. Ilpal, Nog, and Bashir followed him inside, and together they all made their way down.  
  
“I don’t hear them as much anymore,” Nog whispered when everyone had gathered at the bottom of the ladder.  
  
Damar tried to ignore what his racing mind told him that might mean. Instead he focused on his where he was placing his feet, and tried to avoid touching the walls any more than he absolutely had to. They came to the mirror of the second floor landing, which led to the two side wings of the house. Multiple branching corridors disappeared into the darkness to either side of them, but they followed Nog’s ears down further still.  
  
“Whoever it is she’s working with, I wonder why they’re so fascinated with _caves_ ,” Nog said.  
  
Damar had some questions of his own, but they had nothing to do with the choice of setting. “This has been down here the whole time. They could have packed these corridors with explosives. They could have sent an assassin into the building to kill me in my sleep. Why didn’t they do anything?” he wondered aloud. He certainly would have taken advantage of such a convenient weakness in his enemy’s defenses. It was almost foolish not to, and it worried him that they must have had something far worse in mind.  
  
Soon they came to a landing where the start of the third and final staircase brought them down to a wide door. To their right and left were two more just like it, but the others seemed to have been overtaken by some form of mineral growth. Nog stepped up and gently pressed his ear to the one in front of them. It was stained by patches of black and brown rust and coated in something that appeared slick to the touch, but that didn’t seem to bother him as he leaned in to listen. “I think this is the right way.”  
  
“You _think?_ ” Ilpal asked. “Can we even open that door? It looks like it hasn’t been touched in years.”  
  
Nog stood back and shrugged. “Only one way to find out,” he said, before tapping the release panel on the wall. With a deafening groan the door pulled away from the frame, grinding along its track and disappearing into the rock wall. When it finally stopped Nog uncovered his ears and blew out a relieved sigh. “That explains the vibrations, at least.”  
  
The door opened onto a yawning black pit, over which a single walkway stretched from one side to the other. Bashir pulled out his tricorder. “It’s about three hundred meters deep. I’m reading organic material at the bottom, but no lifesigns.”  
  
“A convenient place to dispose of one’s enemies,” Damar muttered with no small amount of disgust.  
  
There was no railing along the walkway, and no indication that the metal struts that held it would support even one person, let alone four—even if one of them was half the size of the others. Damar put his weight on one foot and tapped the rusted catwalk with the other, careful not to lose his balance and tumble into the pit to join whatever bones had amassed there over the centuries. He could only imagine how many victims of the Order had met their end in this dark space below the world, never to be seen again. Neutralized and disposed of neatly in a place no one would ever find them. What a monstrous people they had allowed themselves to become, all in the name of order and the facade of security.  
  
“I’ll go first this time,” Ilpal offered. She slipped past Damar and onto the catwalk, which groaned, but held beneath her weight. “Seems safe,” she said. She gave it an experimental bounce to be sure, and the others all panicked at once. Damar almost reached out for her, but she waved him away with a frown. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”  
  
They crossed the pit safely, with Bashir bringing up the rear of the party. When they were across Nog stopped them again, pointing toward one of five identical doors before them. “We would never find our way through here without those ears of yours,” Damar said. “These catacombs are obviously designed to trap anyone who doesn’t already know the way.”  
  
“Well, I hope you’re paying attention, because I won’t be able to listen our way back to the surface.”  
  
“Don’t worry,” Bashir reassured them both, “I’ve memorized our route.”  
  
Past one more door nearly sealed shut by rust, the sounds of the two women arguing finally became loud enough for more than just Nog’s ears to detect. Damar took off down the corridor at a sprint, heedless of whatever traps might be waiting for him. When he determined that the source of their voices lay no more than a few short meters ahead, and he could finally make out more than meaningless sounds, Damar slowed himself to a stealthier pace to quiet his approach. He stopped at the mouth of a short hallway.  
  
“ _Silence yourself!_ ” he heard Nelara shout.  
  
Damar peered around the corner and took in the details of the hallway; set at intervals on either side were doors that appeared smaller than those they had passed on their way down. Each was set with a small window in the top, and a security keypad on the outside. Two of the visible cells were lit within, but only one showed any signs of movement.  
  
“What are you planning to do?” Kira demanded, her voice echoing off the walls. “You haven’t hurt anyone yet, you can still—”  
  
“ _Yet_ ,” Nelara interrupted.  
  
Bashir and the others caught up to him at last, and together the four of them slowly approached the cell that seemed to contain the two women. Shadows bounced off the walls, but it was impossible to tell where they were standing, or whether it was safe to enter without being attacked or putting Kira at risk. Firing was not an option at all, though Damar wasn’t sure anyone had expressed that to Ilpal. She practically bounced on her toes, with both pistols held at the ready. With his back flat against the wall, Bashir made his way closer to the door of Kira’s cell. There was some sort of quiet commotion taking place inside. To Damar's ears it sounded like boots shuffling over the stone floor, but there was nothing else to indicate that anyone was being harmed. Just as Bashir dared to crane his neck and peer through the small window at the top of the metal door, it opened, and both women came charging out into the hallway. Bashir stumbled back into Ilpal, who stopped him before he could fall.  
  
Kira’s arms were behind her back, with her elbows bent to keep her from freeing herself through any clever contortion. Nelara held her with an arm around the throat, and in the instant it took everyone in the hallway to assess the situation, she had already brought her weapon to the underside of Kira’s jaw. “Get back!” she shouted at them. “I’ll kill her!”  
  
“You won’t do that,” Bashir said. His voice had taken on the same soft tone he employed against his patients. It showed no signs of calming Nelara, who bared her teeth in a feral snarl as the doctor slowly approached her. “Let the colonel go.”  
  
Damar was almost certain he could hit Nelara before she managed to discharge her weapon, but he couldn’t bring himself to aim. His arm was dead weight at his side, and the phaser Bashir had given him was less than useless as he watched the scene before him unfold one second at a time. Nelara dug the muzzle of the disruptor into Kira's neck and dragged her backwards, toward the corner of the short hallway. Each time someone took a step toward her she tightened her hold.  
  
Ilpal and Nog had their own weapons up and ready, but Damar knew he was the only one among them with a clean line of sight on Nelara. He simply couldn't raise his weapon.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before anything else I'd like to mention that what had previously been the epilogue to this story, set to be posted with this chapter, will now be posted on its own as a 7th chapter. Please look for that ~~later today~~ tomorrow (11/18).

“Nelara, listen to me,” Bashir said slowly. “Everything can be put right. No one has been harmed, and no one _is going_ to be harmed. I know you don’t want to—”  
  
“You don’t know anything!” Nelara shrieked. She heaved a manic laugh that sounded nothing like the young woman who had been so quiet and calm for all the months she’d worked at Damar’s side. He watched her over Bashir’s shoulder as the doctor approached as cautiously as he could manage, one foot in front of the other, his hands held up at his sides. She looked like a wounded animal, prepared to die fighting if need be. “You don’t know what I have been through,” she continued. Her voice had become a dangerous growl. “What it’s _like_ for someone like me.”  
  
“Of course, you’re absolutely right. I can scarcely imagine what you’ve been through. But Colonel Kira is not your enemy. _We_ are not your enemies.” Bashir held his hand out. “Give me the weapon, and we can end this.”  
  
But Nelara was no longer focused on Bashir; her eyes flickered from Damar to Kira, and then all around the room as she continued to back herself into a corner—in every conceivable way. When she hit the wall she slackened her grip on the pistol in her hand, but not by much. Not enough to create an opening and allow one of them to intervene before she fired.  
  
“ _This_ saved me,” she continued, inclining her head to indicate the changes that had been made to her face. She seemed to be talking to herself as much as anyone else in the small, dark hallway. “It gave me meaning. Do you understand that? Before this I was just something distasteful; an unfortunate souvenir of the Occupation.”  
  
Understanding widened Kira’s eyes. “You’re half-Bajoran,” she said.  
  
“No!” Nelara jerked Kira back against her, digging the muzzle of the disruptor into her neck so hard that Kira hissed in pain. “Not anymore!”  
  
Damar couldn’t keep silent any longer. “You will always be what you are. You can’t just hide that, Nelara.” He paused long enough to think of something—anything—that might reach her, convince her to step back from the point of no return. “But more importantly than that, you know _me_ ,” he said quickly. “You know what I wanted to do for people like you. Why throw away everything we’ve done together for Cardassia?”  
  
A flicker of hesitation was all he earned for his efforts, and then Nelara readjusted her grip on the weapon. “You’re a _liar_ ,” she sneered. “I know what you did; what you think of _people like me_.” Her words carried so much hate that they may as well have been tipped with poison. Her eyes became cold and she flexed her hand on the disruptor's grip, and Damar knew then that she meant to fire. Whether or not it resulted in her own death, she had every intention of killing Kira. She turned her head just enough to look at her hostage and smirked. “I was told I’d be punished if she was harmed, but… I don’t believe it will matter anymore. I never quite understood her significance, to be honest.”  
  
Before she could fire, a large gray hand broke through the window of the cell beside them and grabbed Nelara by her long braid. She was dragged to the door as her first shot missed, striking the ceiling and sending small chunks of rock raining down on the rescue party. Damar and Bashir both reached for Kira and pulled her away before Nelara could attempt to fire again, and in the seconds between, Ilpal rushed in and crowded her back against the cell door, where the unknown savior’s hand still held her firmly by her hair.  
  
“Are you alright?” Bashir asked Kira between breaths. She had landed on her knees, and Damar was already fast at work freeing her from the restraints. Three sets of neutronium-alloy cuffs spanned the length of her arms. Clearly Kira’s penchant for aggression and creativity had preceded her.  
  
“I’m fine, mostly,” Kira answered. She tried to look over her shoulder at Damar. “What took you—”  
  
“Don’t,” Damar warned. “I _will_ leave you like this.”  
  
While Ilpal divested Nelara of her weapon, eventually wrestling her to the ground where she couldn’t cause anymore harm, Nog made his way over to release the occupant of the cell. He stood on his toes and peered through the window. “ _Kren?_ ”  
  
Bashir let Damar finish freeing Kira, apparently satisfied that she was indeed healthy apart from a few minor scrapes. He helped Nog pull open the door to Kren’s cell to release the older Cardassian. “How ever did you end up here?” he asked when Kren finally came stomping out. His mechanical arm was missing, having been severed roughly at the point of attachment.  
  
“Ask _her_ ,” Kren snarled at Nelara’s prone form on the ground. “I went to sleep one night, next thing I know I wake up in this place. Where are we, anyway?” He grunted in appreciation when Nog emerged from the cell carrying his missing arm.  
  
“Under his house,” Nog said, pointing to Damar. “Did you… did you rip your own arm off to get free?” he asked, looking uncomfortably at the arm. “There was a shackle attaching this to the wall of the cell…”  
  
“Only a fool would chain someone to the wall by a prosthetic limb,” Kren said. He hefted the arm over his shoulder and glared at the back of Nelara’s head. “You would think she might have learned a thing or two in the time she spent _spying_ on us. How did you manage to figure out where we were?”  
  
Nog and Bashir began to explain the series of events that had led them to the tunnels below the house, but it quickly faded into the background for Damar; he finally unlocked the last of Kira’s restraints, moving back so she had room to stand. Never fully trusting Bashir’s medical expertise, he did his own quick appraisal, and was pleased to see Kira didn’t appear to be suffering from the weeks she had spent in captivity. Only her uniform seemed to have fared poorly, with numerous rips and a few marks that Damar was relieved to discover weren’t bloodstains.  
  
“I suppose we’ll have to reevaluate our theory about Kren’s part in all this,” Bashir said at the conclusion of his own retelling. The sudden change in subject broke the spell that had kept Damar so focused on Kira.  
  
Kren eyed them both with a frown. “What do you mean _my involvement?_ You thought I was part of this?”  
  
Damar brushed the debris off his clothes and stood straight as he turned to face Kren. “I still don’t know that I believe you aren’t,” he said coldly.  
  
“That’s a fine way to thank me.”  
  
While Kren and Damar postured quietly at one another, Ilpal dragged Nelara back up to her feet and slapped a set of the restraints around her wrists. “We’ll have to get back up to the surface before we can beam out of here,” she said. “I hope you weren’t just bragging about memorizing the way.” She gave Kren a very obvious once-over and arched an eyebrow skeptically. “You think he’ll make it across that catwalk?”  
  
  
  
  
The question of jurisdiction took them no time at all to solve, to the immense relief of everyone in the party. Damar was more than happy to hand Nelara over to Bajoran custody, and allow them to try her for her numerous crimes. He was certain the Civil Assembly would agree that it was the right choice, given all that had happened. Nelara was almost immediately beamed away to the _Defiant_ with Ilpal, who seemed only too excited to begin the extradition proceedings.  
  
Following their departure, Damar invited Bashir and the others to remain as his guests until they were ready to depart. For the moment it was the only way he could repay any of them. Among them only Kira opted to stay on the surface, citing her desire to sleep in an actual bed, if only for one night. Damar found that as pleasing as he imagined Kren _didn’t_ —the old man had harrumphed and muttered the entire way up the stairs to Damar’s office, where it was agreed upon that they would discuss both his capture and what the future held for him.  
  
Eventually Nog and Bashir left for their ship, and Kira was whisked away by a housekeeper to one of the guest rooms. Damar assigned the guards to various tasks around—and under—the grounds and then joined Kren in the office, where he found his chair had been appropriated by his former head of security. “I see your confinement hasn’t tempered any of your habits,” Damar said as he took a seat on the corner of the desk.  
  
“A few weeks in a cell is nothing.” Kren dismissed the comment with a wave of his prosthetic arm, which Bashir had thoughtfully reattached for him prior to his departure. The wounds he had sustained punching through the small window in the cell door had likewise been healed, but he still held his good hand close to his body protectively. “But it gave me plenty of time to get to know the Colonel better, once she arrived,” he added.  
  
“Is that so?”  
  
Kren hummed an affirmative. “I told you before: I like her. But you probably don’t believe that.” He propped his legs up on the desk next to Damar. “And I’m sure you’re still determined to see this through, even though _everything_ I said ended up happening.”  
  
“Rather conveniently, too,” Damar said. He crossed his arms and looked down at Kren in the chair. He and Bashir had already determined that Kren was likely innocent of any involvement in the kidnappings, given that he had apparently been in a cell for most of that time. Bashir had also surreptitiously run a few scans to determine if any of the trace elements found in the caves on Orias III were present on Kren’s clothes. It seemed all that he could find was sweat and more than a few kanar stains. Regardless, Damar wanted to hear the explanation from Kren anyway. He was curious what the man would say to defend himself, when pushed. “Why don’t you tell me about that?” he asked.  
  
“Please,” Kren snorted. “If I’d wanted to kill you, I would have done it with a lot less fanfare and a lot more success. And I certainly wouldn’t have dragged her into it. I was the one trying to _protect you_ , not get you killed. Maybe you’ve forgotten that.”  
  
“The things you said—”  
  
Kren shook his head, and Damar withheld the rest of his complaint. “I needed to push you,” he explained. “I wanted you to give up on her.”  
  
“ _Why?_ What is it you are so worried she’ll do?” Damar insisted.  
  
“It’s not _her_ I’m worried about. It’s _you_. It’s what you’ll do.”  
  
Damar shook his head. “I would never jeopardize the safety of Cardassia for Kira, nor would she expect it—or accept if I ever attempted to. This, all of this,” Damar gestured to the floor below them, “was as much for _us_ as it was for her. The rest of the Alpha Quadrant was ready to let us collapse because of what they thought we’d done, regardless of what it might mean. The Klingons were preparing to invade just because they could, and they knew this time no one would stop them. I have a brief moment of clarity to thank for salvaging this situation, and yes—for having Kira back.” Sitting there, staring at Kren, he felt as if he could no longer contain all the anger he’d bottled up since their last confrontation. He stood up and started walking around the room, setting everything straight that Bashir had moved. “You don’t know what she’s done for us,” he said.  
  
“I’ve read the reports.”  
  
“But you weren’t _there_. I don’t just mean during the rebellion—that’s a matter of history at this point. If you think she’s a danger to the Union because of my feelings, then you cannot see how much we need people like her, and in that case you have no place here.”  
  
Kren was quiet as Damar made his way back around to the desk and turned upright everything that had been toppled by the subtle vibrations of the house. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but the thought of the catacombs, and the yawning pit they contained, unsettled him greatly. He didn’t like the thought of sleeping over a house built atop such a hollow foundation, and concealing the bodies of so many dead. He wondered what Kren would have to say about that, once the present matter had been settled.  
  
“Well, you didn’t make a complete fool of yourself like I thought you would,” Kren said finally. “I suppose I might have jumped to conclusions.”  
  
Damar stared at him blankly. “I didn’t what?”  
  
“I imagined that when something did happen—and I knew it was only a matter of time until it did—you’d go on a rampage, demanding vengeance or just blasting your way across the Alpha Quadrant.” He leaned back until the chair’s mechanisms creaked in protest. “I thought you would become your own downfall.”  
  
“You have a very low opinion of my self control.”  
  
“I’ve spent a lot of time in your company. It’s hard not to.”  
  
Shaking his head, Damar leaned down over the desk. Even with his palms on the flat, black glass, he couldn’t sense any indication of the vibrations Nog had detected earlier. On Damar’s orders, half of the guards had ventured below to map out the labyrinth of passageways and eventually recover the remains in the pit. They had been at it for hours, opening and closing doors as they carefully explored the halls one by one. Every so often something in the house would shift in place or fall over, indicating that they were still hard at work. It was difficult to believe something so massive could exist without anyone’s knowledge. “Why are you still here, then?” he asked Kren after some time.  
  
“There’s really only room for you to improve, isn’t there?” Kren said with another grin. “And I already told you, I believe in the path you’ve laid out for Cardassia. I want to see where it will take us.”  
  
“And if I refuse to give up Kira?”  
  
Kren scrubbed his good hand over his chin and looked off to the side with a lopsided frown. “I suppose if she doesn’t wise up and do it on her own, I can’t really stop you. I still think the two of you are playing with fire, but you’ve come through it once already, maybe you can make it work. Probably not.”  
  
“What an inspiring vote of confidence.” In addition to being something of a backhanded compliment, it was the closest thing to approval that he was ever going to get where Kren was concerned, though he wasn’t sure why he wanted it. Still, it was some sort of progress, even if it required an enormous sacrifice of Damar’s own pride to seek neutral ground after their falling out. When all was said and done, he knew he needed Kren. Especially following the events that had led them to uncovering Nelara’s betrayal. Even Bashir, who certainly had no abundance of affection for the man, had made as much clear to him when they were discussing the results of his clandestine scans. But Damar wasn’t just going to let it go without _some_ satisfaction on the matter. “Your comments were out of line,” he said.  
  
“They were.”  
  
“However, I _may_ have been rash in my decision to dismiss you.”  
  
“You were.”  
  
Damar sighed. Why did it feel as though finding peace with Kren took more effort than overcoming his past with Kira? “In that case—”  
  
“Alright, that’s enough talk.” Kren lifted himself out of the chair and rolled it around to the side of the desk with one arm. “Here’s your chair. There’s work to be done, I’ll be downstairs with my men.”  
  
“ _My_ men,” Damar corrected.  
  
“Of course, _Legate_.”  
  
Damar stared in silence as he watched Kren stomp unevenly out of the room. After the door closed he sat down in the chair, noting with some disappointment that it felt far less stable than it had before. An apt comparison to his life in recent days, if ever there was one.  
  
  
  
  
Later that evening, after chasing the guards away from where they were loitering in the foyer and finally ordering Kren and the others to seal up the hole Ilpal had blasted in the wall, Damar retired to his quarters. He had just removed his jacket—still stained with Nelara’s blood—and his shirt when he heard a strange sound coming from his private bathroom. Though Bashir had retrieved both the Starfleet combadge and the phaser that had been loaned to Damar for the mission, there were weapons in both the office and the bedroom. After the second assassination attempt Kren had insisted on placing a disruptor in nearly every room in the house. Damar carefully crept over to the bedside table and withdrew one of the weapons from the drawer, placing it on stun as he quietly approached the door. What he found when he peered around the corner was, thankfully, not at all what he had expected, and with a sigh he stepped fully into the room. “I could have shot you,” he said, holding up the disruptor.  
  
Kira lifted her arms out of the water and stretched them along the edge of the bath. “I doubt that.”  
  
“And just why is that?”  
  
“Because you kept your weapon behind the wall when you peeked in here,” she teased. Her smile was warm and far more cheerful than Damar would have expected after what she had been through. It pleased him to see that she didn’t seem to be suffering any lingering effects from her ordeal, although he supposed she was accustomed to being in tighter spots. And at least everyone had come through more or less undamaged.  
  
Damar entered the room and shut the door. He decided there was no sense gawking at her from the threshold, especially when she seemed perfectly comfortable to let him see as much as he wanted. He stood in front of the tub and crossed his arms. “You’re certainly making yourself at home,” he observed sarcastically.  
  
Kira shrugged. Like most Cardassian baths, the recessed basin was wide, but shallow, and the water would only fill to a certain height. The design served in part to conserve the already precious resource. In this case it left Kira sitting with a significant portion of her body bared above the waterline, and made the effects of her casual shrug that much more pronounced. “You told me to, remember?” she said.  
  
From the milky color of the water, Damar surmised that she had laced it with one or two of the bathing oils that could be found in the nearby cabinet, which meant that she had also helped herself to his things. An act that was as endearing as it was aggravating. The air in the room was heavy with the scent of warm spice, and sharp in a way that made Damar want to breathe deeply when the rising steam carried it close to him. Combined with the sight of Kira’s bare skin, beaded with droplets of water and glistening from the oils, he nearly forgot what they were talking about. “Did I?” he asked absently. Kneeling down on the floor in front of the bath he reached down with one hand and traced a line from Kira’s calf to her ankle. He longed to touch elsewhere. “I should join you,” he heard himself say.  
  
“Well, you’re welcome to use the water, but I’m done,” Kira said. In one swift motion she stood up, and the water cascaded down from her naked body back into the bath.  
  
Damar looked up and felt his pulse quicken. “Are you?”  
  
“I am. Do you have a towel?”  
  
If this was a game, it was cruel. He pushed himself up from the floor and hurried to find her something she could wrap around herself. Finally he came upon a robe with long, silver sleeves that tapered to a point at the cuffs. The rest of it was a sheer, iridescent black and hemmed in the same silver. He held it up and Kira slipped her arms in first before wrapping the rest around herself. It clung to her wet skin and did little to hide her curves, which Damar appreciated perhaps a bit more than was polite.  
  
Kira padded out of the bathroom, her bare feet making quiet sounds upon the tile as she walked confidently—right into his office, rather than the bedroom. Damar followed, drawn by the lingering scent of the bath oils on her skin and oblivious to the wrong turn she had taken until he found himself standing by his desk. “I take it you didn’t mean to come in here,” he said.  
  
“I didn’t. I suppose it’s going to take me some time to learn the layout of this place. If you stay, I mean.”  
  
He wasn’t certain about the future of the residence, but the thought of having Kira around on a more frequent basis greatly appealed to him. He joined her by the desk and reached up to gently tuck some of her hair back behind her ear. “You’re welcome to take all the time you need,” he said.  
  
Kira shook her head. “The _Defiant_ is leaving tomorrow. Though…” She tilted her head slightly and shrugged. “I didn’t use all of my leave when I visited Bajor. But I should probably come back from the dead before I start planning another vacation.”  
  
Damar chuckled. “That might be wise. At least you don’t have to worry that anyone has erected a monument to your memory while you were gone.”  
  
“Well, you never know. ” She wrapped her arms around herself and made a contented sound. “It feels so good to be _clean_ ,” she said. “No one should ever have to spend three weeks in one uniform.”  
  
“I’ve done it before.”  
  
“Oh, I know you have. I lived in a cellar with you and Garak, remember?” She smiled faintly and turned toward the window. After a quiet minute watching the lights of the city she whispered, “It’s good to be out of there. I suppose I’ll have to go over it all again when I write my incident report.”  
  
Damar came up behind her and squeezed her shoulders gently. “You should rest,” he said. As much as every cell in his body ached to touch her more intimately, he could wait. His only indulgence was a quick kiss placed at the nape of her neck.  
  
Kira laughed. “I’ve been sitting around in cells for almost a month.” She pulled free of his hands and turned around to face him. Slowly, with deliberate care, she touched her fingertips to _his_ shoulders, tracing the tapered scales as she watched his chest rise and fall faster with each breath.  
  
“Kira…”  
  
“I don’t want to _rest_ ,” she said. The finality of it quelled the remainder of Damar’s objections. She continued, “I wouldn’t mind shooting something, but since that’s off the table, the next best thing is working out some of my frustration on you.”  
  
Damar closed his eyes as Kira touched her lips to his throat. “So, you’re only using me,” he said.  
  
“ _Mm_ ,” she hummed. “More or less.”  
  
The slippery fabric of the robe swept across his bare chest as Kira leaned in closer, and Damar groaned low in his throat. “I’m strangely comfortable with that,” he breathed.  
  
She cupped the back of his head to pull him into a kiss, and Damar happily complied with the demands of her mouth. While she was occupied with that, he reached down to untie the belt of her robe. It fell open easily, allowing him to wrap his hands around her waist and pull her close against him. He wanted her to feel just how much he desired her.  
  
Kira hummed happily and reached down to undo the catch of his pants. “I missed you,” she whispered against his lips. “For the first time that I can think of, I was actually worried I would never see you again.”  
  
He frowned. “Kira.”  
  
Her smile said that it was all just part of the game, but that didn’t make him feel any better. Damar continued to pout at her until she grasped his waistband with both hands and shoved down. The whole time she watched him with a dangerous, predatory stare that actually alarmed him much more than it aroused. He was about to tell her as much when she suddenly dropped to her knees before him. “Wh—what are you doing?” he stammered.  
  
“Something I couldn’t stop thinking about the last time we were together. And I think…” She hesitated only a second or two, and then reached out to wrap her fingers around his length. “I think I want to now.”  
  
Her palm was so _very_ warm, and her fingers twitched as she held him, sending little jolts of pleasure skipping along his nerves each time she shifted her hold on him. When she licked her lips Damar’s heart nearly shot into his throat. “You don’t have to,” he said breathlessly, hoping she wouldn’t, and at the same time _desperately_ wishing she would.  
  
“I want to,” was all Kira answered. All at once she swallowed him down and came back up again, and the soft heat of her mouth as it slipped over him drove all of the air from Damar’s lungs in one heaving shudder. She pulled her mouth away and looked up at him with wide, dark eyes. “Is it too much?” she asked, her lips just barely touching his sensitive skin. It was as unwholesome an image as he could ever hope to imagine, and yet he’d never desired her more than he did at that moment.  
  
“We don’t—we don’t often do this,” he explained. “It’s—”  
  
“The scales?” Kira asked, her mouth widening into a playful smile. She followed the question with a long, slow lick from the base all the way back up again.  
  
Damar’s knees threatened to buckle and he nodded pathetically. “They’re _very_ sensitive,” he whispered.  
  
That only seemed to encourage her, which Damar realized too late he really should have foreseen. She did it again, producing the same result, and this time he couldn’t hold back a sound that was far too close to a whimper for his own comfort. He bit his lower lip to silence himself, but Kira caught on; she worked her tongue along each scale individually, taking her time and tracing the edges of each as she made her way up again.  
  
“ _Please_ ,” Damar gasped.  
  
“Please what?”  
  
“This is—it’s like _torture_...” He didn’t want her to stop, but he also couldn’t bear the thought of letting her continue. The conflicting desires left him without the focus he needed to keep himself still, and he slowly began to rock his hips, mindlessly seeking more contact out of pure instinct. Below him Kira snickered, and she gave up her casual torment to abruptly plunge her mouth down over the entire length. Damar made a strangled sound and grasped the back of her head with his hand. He held her in place while he thrust into her mouth, and for her part Kira seemed content to let him do it. She brought her hands up to his thighs and lightly drew her nails over the tapered ends of his ridges, teasing him until Damar had lost all notion of attempting to control himself. He felt her tongue twisting and writhing against him, and each sound she made sent tantalizing vibrations along the length of his shaft. It was bliss, and it was agony, and he ached for more of her.  
  
Supporting himself with one hand on the window frame, Damar looked down and watched as he slipped in and out of her mouth. Her thick lashes were heavy against her flushed cheeks, and her eyes were nearly closed. The quiet sounds she made as she swallowed him down were enough to drive him mad all on their own, but she added to it with a piercing heat that was driving him toward the edge at a speed that left him shaking. Summoning every ounce of willpower he had remaining, Damar pulled himself away, and managed to disengage from her warm, wet mouth. Kira looked up and arched an eyebrow. Without a word, he took her by the hand and pulled her up from the floor, into an embrace that he quickly turned into a passionate kiss. Kira cupped his jaw gently leaning into him while her other hand sought to continue the torment she had enjoyed so much before. When he felt her fingers brush against his erection he growled and abruptly tore himself free of both the kiss and her touch. He turned her around and pushed her against the window, and she started to object until he shoved the silken fabric of her robe up over her backside. Then she understood.  
  
He had little to do that her efforts before hadn’t already assisted; when he entered her she was more than ready for him. She gripped the catseye window frame and let her head go slack between her shoulders, groaning low in her throat as he moved in her, and after the first thrusts she pushed back to meet him. Damar let go of the robe and reached up to hold her by the base of her neck with one hand. With the other he saw to her pleasure, teasing gently at first with a slow, deliberately light touch. Kira gasped helplessly, and she couldn’t seem to choose between squeezing her thighs around his hand or spreading her legs to invite him deeper. The raw need of it drove him wild with each shift of her body below his, but he held himself back, exercising every ounce of restraint he could manage in order to draw out the experience. Despite that, eventually Kira seemed to grow impatient with the speed of his fingers; she put her own hand over his and urged him to go faster. The hand he held at her neck slipped around the front of her chest to pull her up until she was bent back against him, nearly standing up straight while he continued to thrust into her. With his mouth next to her ear he whispered things he wouldn’t have dared to say in the past, but now seemed natural between them; words he might have been too proud to say to any other woman. Kira responded to it with whispered, needy pleas that Damar happily obliged as well.  
  
He knew she was close when she started to stutter his name, her body alternately going taut and relaxing as she unconsciously anticipated the building orgasm that was coming whether or not she was prepared for it. Damar never stopped, and she continued to guide him with her own fingers, holding his hand down when she wanted more pressure. At the same time Damar could feel himself nearing the edge, and it was a battle of wills to hold on so she could have her pleasure first. In the end he barely made it; the first spasm gripped him as he was forced to let go and give in, and his body took control. When it was over Kira pulled his hand away and leaned forward again, with shaking arms holding her up against the window frame. The robe had fallen down to cover her from behind, but now it was sweat that made the cloth cling to her body, and it showed the faint tremor in her legs that made Damar regret not bringing her back to the bedroom first.  
  
He would have offered to carry her there if he thought she wouldn’t murder him for the attempt. Or that he might be capable of it. “Let’s go to bed,” he suggested instead. He offered her a hand for support, and she only hesitated a second before taking it—progress, he decided. Together they went into the bedroom, and Damar pulled her down onto the mattress beside him, where she snugged herself against him like a pillow.  
  
“I’m glad you were there,” she said quietly, and with no specific indication of when or where she meant. Somehow the ambiguity made it better, he decided, and Damar wondered if maybe she hadn’t intended it that way.  
  
He craned his neck to watch her settle her head on his chest, and then he relaxed as well. To Damar, each gentle breath across his skin felt like an affirmation of everything that had passed between them since their first reunion on Bajor. Good or bad, it had all brought them to this moment. Somehow, despite all the reasons it shouldn’t have happened, here they were.  
  
As he tried to surrender himself to sleep Damar felt a tug of agitation pulling at his thoughts. A self-serving, emotional desire that he had ignored up to that point. The last time he had been so tempted to make a fool of himself he’d managed to curb the impulse, and pull himself back from the edge; each passing second lying with Kira’s arm draped across his waist made it more and more difficult to imagine why he would stop himself. He was certain she could hear the erratic hammering of his heart, and it only compounded the shame he felt—shame at his own indecisiveness, shame that he wanted to say anything in the first place. Most of all, shame that he feared what _she_ might say. That she might reject him. Weren’t the feelings they had managed to scrape together from the wreckage of the past enough for him? Why threaten that with greed, he demanded of himself. He was almost prepared to bury the idea once again, but then a small and insistent voice reminded him, _You could have more_.  
  
Finally, after agonizing over it for what felt like hours, Damar drew in a steadying breath and said, “I love you.”  
  
Kira tensed, and the slow waves of warm air on his skin stopped. For one terrible moment Damar was sure he had just destroyed everything, and brought all they had built between them crashing down.  
  
Then she relaxed again, and the warmth returned, a rhythmic sensation that felt even more reassuring than the palm that gently squeezed his side. She was silent for a while, and then he felt her stir as she pulled the blanket around herself. “I’m not… _there_ ,” she said finally. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice; a gentle quaver that underlined her words and made them as powerful as if she had shouted them. “I don’t know if I ever will be.” She lifted her head and looked up at him. There was no anger in her eyes, nor pity. Her actual emotions were unreadable, but Damar dared to hope they fell on the side of concern. “Are you okay with that?” she asked.  
  
It was the rejection he had feared, but not one that would destroy him. Damar swallowed back the dread that had turned into a hard lump in his throat and nodded. “Of course,” he said. When she didn’t seem to believe him, he gave her a halfhearted smile to reinforce the answer. Eventually Kira set her head back down on his chest and her eyes fluttered closed. After some time Damar was certain she had fallen asleep, and he lowered the lights.  
  
At least, he decided, he had been honest. Whatever else happened, he had his answer. And that was enough. It would have to be.


	7. Chapter 7

Kira had never been on Cardassia in the early morning—at least not outside of a basement. In her experience the planet was always hot, arid, and miserably unpleasant. But as it turned out the mornings were cool, and in the gray light just before the sun stretched over the city, it was almost pleasant. Watching the thinning mist before it burned off she could almost imagine she was somewhere else, though it felt strange that she would want to, and even more so that she wouldn’t.  
   
Damar lay in the bed behind her, sprawled out across the entire mattress in a large X, and snoring face-down into his pillow. The second she had slipped from the bed he unconsciously moved to occupy all the space she left behind while gathering the blankets around himself like a cocoon. Kira rolled her eyes before turning back to the window. He might not have been a conqueror in his waking hours, but he did well enough in his sleep.  
   
The replicator in the adjacent office made a decent cup of tea, though she had been forced to settle for red leaf. It wasn’t her favorite, but it was also better than nothing. She watched the light outside slowly lifting the wisps of mist from the ground and evaporating them like ghosts. With them she let the last of her recent ordeal fade into memory; one more battle that she had managed to come through alive. After so many years spent fighting for herself it was actually easier to process those than the smaller events that worked their way deep into her subconscious before she even realized what was happening.  
   
No matter how long or how intently she stared at the city outside the window, her mind kept revisiting what Damar had confessed the night before. She could hear it; the sound of his voice, the way he spoke each short word almost as though he was surprised his mouth could form them. She knew, on some level, that he would say it eventually. She had known since their reunion on the station that his feelings for her ran much deeper than she originally believed, and their conversation on the way back to Cardassia had only confirmed her suspicions. But none of that made it any easier to actually hear him say that he was in love with her. Nothing made the feelings she had for him, feelings she herself didn’t yet fully understand, simpler to reconcile with what she now knew for sure he felt.  
   
The combadge Julian had replaced for her beeped from where she had left it on the bedside table, and Damar stirred at the sudden noise intruding on a silence that had previously only been broken by his own awful snoring. Kira abandoned the cup of tea by the window and walked over to answer. “Kira here,” she said as quietly as possible. It was already too late; she looked over at the bed to find Damar’s blue eyes visible through narrow slits that he aimed directly at the communicator in her hand.  
   
“Tell whoever it is I’m going to have them thrown in that pit below the house,” came his muffled threat uttered through the pillow.  
   
_“Colonel.”_ It was Julian, who sounded as though he had only just woken up, himself. _“I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour.”_  
   
“I was already awake. Is everything alright?”  
   
The silence that followed her question was answer enough; Kira exchanged a worried glance with Damar while she waited for a response.  
   
_“I think it’s best if you come up to the_ Defiant _. There’s something private I’d like to discuss with you.”_  
   
“Private?”  
   
_“It’s a… personal matter,”_ Julian said. _“Although you are certainly welcome to bring anyone you wish, of course.”_  
   
Damar was already up and searching for his clothes before Kira acknowledged Bashir’s request and closed the channel. When she turned around he was toeing on his boots. “You don’t have to come,” she said.  
   
“If you would rather I remain here, I will.”  
   
After giving it some thought she shook her head. “No, come with me. I don’t know what this is about, but…” She stopped and sighed.  
   
“What’s wrong?”  
   
“My uniform. It’s in my room.” Someone had taken it to be cleaned and repaired, but she left it behind during her spontaneous—and slightly juvenile, if she was being honest—mad dash down the hall to Damar’s bath. “Can you get it for me?”  
   
“What’s wrong with what you’re wearing?” he asked.  
   
Kira held out her arms, and the silver and black robe fell open, baring her naked body underneath.  
   
“I still don’t understand why you can’t wear that up to the _Defiant_.”  
   
“Go get my uniform.”  
   
   
   
   
Julian was waiting for them at the transporter pad when they arrived. “I’m sorry to drag you up here so early, but Doctor Tastha contacted me from the station, and I thought it was best if we discussed this matter as soon as possible. Preferably before the extradition proceedings are completed.”  
   
“The extradition? I thought this was a personal matter,” Kira said. “What does—”  
   
“Not here. Follow me.” Julian turned on his heel and led them from the room, out into the corridor and toward Sickbay. His long legs carried him along with a stride both Kira and Damar had trouble matching. By the time they reached Sickbay Julian had already brought Tastha up on the small screen attached to his work station.  
   
_“Colonel Kira, I’m happy to see you’ve been recovered whole, and apparently healthy.”_ She turned a frown on Damar and scoffed. _“All that_ whining. _”_  
   
“Doctor Bashir said you had something to tell me,” Kira prompted. She liked Tastha; anyone who could keep Julian’s natural enthusiasm under control deserved respect. But it was too early to waste time, and the buildup to whatever was so urgent that it required her immediate presence demanded attention now.  
   
_“Yes…”_ Tastha sat back and folded her hands in her lap. _“I suppose I ought to get right to it, then. After we learned that Kivet Nelara was a half-Bajoran, I thought perhaps it might help if I could dig up something more significant that would provide her with incentive to cooperate, should there be a need to question her regarding your whereabouts. To that end, I ran a comparative genetic scan through the Ministry of Health’s database, and the Central Archives.”_  
   
Something about the way Tastha was leading up to how Nelara’s biological background could possibly be a matter of personal interest to her had Kira’s heart rising into her throat. She wanted to shout at the doctor to hurry up, to just say whatever she needed to say, but she managed to contain her impatience long enough to keep from causing a scene.  
   
_“At first I thought the blood sample I took from Legate Damar’s coat had been contaminated somehow. I asked Doctor Bashir to send me another, taken directly from Nelara herself after she was in custody.”_  
   
“Doctor…”  
   
_“Colonel, the two of you share roughly twenty-five percent of your genetic material.”_  
   
It took a moment for the full weight of what Tastha had told her to sink in, and only seconds more for the other half to hit her like a landslide. Kira tried to breathe, but she couldn’t remember how; the air simply wouldn’t fill her lungs. Distantly she knew that Julian was beside her trying to explain what the results meant, and Damar was growling something at Tastha, but both of their voices disappeared behind the roar of static that suddenly filled her mind.  
   
Tastha ignored Damar and pressed on. _“I’m very sorry to have to tell you like this, but the scan also indicated that—”_  
   
“I know,” Kira managed to force past the narrowing gap in her throat. “It’s Dukat. Her father is Dukat.”  
   
Damar stopped, and Julian’s mouth snapped shut. Between the two of them they didn’t seem able to utter a single sound. Even Tastha had given up on rattling off the results of her work.  
   
It was worse than Dukat coming in the night to steal the memory of her mother from her like a nightmare. It was worse than learning that Meru had enjoyed, even just a little, the safety and comforts of being Dukat’s mistress. _They had conceived a child together._ A child that tied Dukat to Kira through shared blood, and violently tore away the last thin shred of her mother’s memory she had to hold on to. Even in death he refused to leave her be. “I can’t… I…” she started to stammer.  
   
Damar reached out, but she shrugged him away. It was too much. She turned without another word and left, and before the Sickbay doors closed she heard Julian tell Damar to leave her be. It was only fortunate for the both of them that he chose that moment to finally listen to someone else.  
   
The _Defiant_ was suddenly so much bigger than it had ever been before. Corridors led to dead ends she wasn’t expecting, and doors didn’t open when she tried to walk through them. There seemed to be someone in her way no matter which direction she turned. Somehow, through no intention of her own, Kira ended up in the Mess Hall. Unlike everywhere else on the ship it was empty, and blessedly silent.  
   
The tables and attached bench seats were her first victims, and she kicked and hurled anything that wouldn’t remain bolted down until her legs ached and her hands bled.  
   
If Dukat hadn’t been dead already she would have killed him. It wasn’t enough to take her mother away. No—he had dedicated _years_ to tormenting her for his own demented pleasure. He had stolen her mentor from her; done his very best to destroy her bond with Tekeny Ghemor; brought her closer to Ziyal and then used his own daughter just so that he could dig his filthy claws into her life that much deeper; torn Jadzia from her life in his madness; and nearly brought about the destruction of Bajor just to fulfill his twisted, self-appointed destiny. Now, when she thought she was _finally_ free of him, when she was preparing to move on with her life, Dukat’s sickening touch slithered out of the darkness to clutch at her again.  
   
Before she knew it Kira had dismantled most of the replicator station. Pieces of broken glass and torn cable littered the floor around her. The anger was like a slow explosion in her mind that swept away everything else, leaving her only the desire to act and a selfish excuse to ignore the consequences. When she finally reached the limit of what rage could drive her to do, she collapsed against the bulkhead and tried again to breathe. This time the air came more easily, but it had to fight past the heaving in her chest to get there.  
   
   
   
   
Julian entered the room some time later. He was carrying a dermal regenerator in one hand. He said nothing, but simply crouched down next to her and began to repair the damage she had done to her hands.  
   
“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted quietly.  
   
“I would be rather unsettled if you _did_ ,” Julian said. When he was finished with her hands, he turned his back to the wall and sat beside her. “In fact, I’d say this—” he waved a hand to indicate the destruction she had visited upon the defenseless Mess Hall, “is a fairly normal, and even understandable reaction to the sort of news you’ve just received.”  
   
Kira flexed her hands, testing the effects of the regenerator. It frustrated her that they felt fine. She wanted them to hurt, even if she didn’t understand why, and even if the thought unsettled her almost as much as the rage itself had. “Engineering will be after my blood for this,” she said, trying to distract herself from her own discomfort.  
   
“I imagine I’ll receive one or two petitions to leave you behind on Cardassia before we break orbit.”  
   
“Maybe you should listen to them.”  
   
Julian shook his head. “While I’m certain Damar would be pleased by the news, I did tell First Minister Shakaar that I would bring you back to the station. And frankly, I’m tired of doing your job. It’s quite hard, you know.”  
   
“I have to go talk to him.”  
   
“If you mean Damar, he beamed back down to the surface after you left Sickbay.” Julian pushed himself up from the floor and reached down to offer her a hand. “We’re not scheduled to depart for another two hours.”  
   
“I won’t be long,” she said.  
   
Julian inclined his head in a half-nod. “I see…”  
   
As she accepted his hand, Kira wondered if he really did.  
   
   
   
   
Damar was waiting for her in his office, according to Kren. She found him sitting at his desk, pretending to read a padd that, at least from where she was standing, didn’t appear to be turned on. “The _Defiant_ is leaving soon,” he said. “If you’ve come to say goodbye—”  
   
“We need to talk.”  
   
He set the padd down on the desk and glanced around the room before finally giving her a curt nod. When he got up from his desk, it was with slow, measured movements that warned her he already had some notion of what had brought her back down to speak to him. He didn’t look her in the eye until he was a standing before her.  
   
If telling him she wanted to be with him had been difficult, telling him she _couldn’t_ was almost impossible. He wouldn’t understand, and she didn’t expect him to; how could he understand that she felt repulsed by her own desire to reach out to him, even though she wanted it so much at the same time? How could he accept that he had torn apart half the Alpha Quadrant looking for her, and she was repaying him by walking away?  
   
It wasn’t his fault, but he would be the one punished for it, because she couldn’t do anything else. Because she was too weak to ignore the disgust that churned in her every time she thought of her mother and Dukat building their counterfeit life together. How she must have looked back at him lying in bed and thought, _I can love him_.  
   
“Damar, I can’t—”  
   
“I want to apologize,” he spoke over her.  
   
Kira was too stunned to feel annoyed by the interruption. “Apologize?”  
   
Damar nodded, and his uncomfortable stare shifted back down to the floor between them. He lowered his voice and said, “Yes. Last night, when we were… I allowed my emotions to overcome my judgment, and I fear I may have misled you. You’ve been an important ally to Cardassia, and the last thing I want is to damage that relationship with nonsense brought about by the sentimentality of the moment.” He looked up again, and Kira could see that he was fighting to keep his expression impassive, detached. “You understand, of course?” he asked. As if to underscore his casual façade, he reached back for the cup of tea on his desk, and took a sip that was almost steady enough to seem genuine.  
   
“You’re saying…”  
   
“It was wrong of me to tell you I had feelings that I don’t have. It was unfair to you. And I think it’s only right that, as an apology, I release you from any obligations you may have felt were necessary as a result.”  
   
It sounded like the legalese of a Ferengi contract. Damar had clenched his fists, Kira was certain unconsciously, and he appeared on the verge of collapsing from the effort it took to contain whatever emotion was clawing at the wall he had hastily erected around himself. His eyes were pleading with her to accept his offer.  
   
He was letting her go.  
   
“I see,” she said quietly. “So, you aren’t in love with me.”  
   
Looking past her shoulder at the wall, Damar said, “No.”  
   
It hurt. Kira nearly laughed at the realization that it _hurt_ to hear him deny his feelings, even though she knew he was only doing it for her sake, and even though she had come back for the very reason he was refusing to acknowledge them now.  
   
“I understand,” she said. “I appreciate your honesty.”  
   
“Of course.”  
   
“I guess… I’ll show myself out.”  
   
Damar held out a hand toward the door, and Kira nodded. She stepped out into the hallway, and had barely made it two meters from the room before she heard the teacup shatter against a wall. She reached out for the staircase railing to steady herself. Her fingers clenched the metal with a white-knuckle grip, but she managed to peel one hand away and slap her combadge. “Kira to _Defiant_ ,” she forced past the rising panic. “One to beam up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before I get to the thank-yous, I just want to remind everyone that there is still **one more fic in the series** , which I'm about 1/3 of the way through writing now. Please don't hate me!
> 
> Once again I want to thank my friends: winzler, shelderon, and oftaggrivated, who have been exceptionally helpful and patient all the times I've come to them seeking advice or opinions. This story was particularly trying to write, and I probably whined a lot more than usual. Also I want to thank tropical-vice for some last minute reassurance that I really needed.
> 
> Here is the [timeline](http://electricsed.tumblr.com/post/133472686698/ive-created-a-basic-timeline-for-my-ds9-fic) of the series so far as promised.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and I will (hopefully) see some of you when the next fic is finished!


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